Fast simulation of solid tumors thermal ablation treatments with a 3D reaction diffusion model

An efficient computational method for near real-time simulation of thermal ablation of tumors via radio frequencies is proposed. Model simulations of the temperature field in a 3D portion of tissue containing the tumoral mass for different patterns of source heating can be used to design the ablation procedure. The availability of a very efficient computational scheme makes it possible to update the predicted outcome of the procedure in real time. In the algorithms proposed here a discretization in space of the governing equations is followed by an adaptive time integration based on implicit multistep formulas. A modification of the ode15s MATLAB function which uses Krylov space iterative methods for the solution of the linear systems arising at each integration step makes it possible to perform the simulations on standard desktop for much finer grids than using the built-in ode15s. The proposed algorithm can be applied to a wide class of nonlinear parabolic differential equations.