Tuning the Pennes Perfusion Rate to Model Large Vessel Cooling Effects in Hepatic Radiofrequency Ablation

Radio frequency ablation (RFA) has become a popular method for the minimally invasive treatment of liver cancer. However, the success rate of these treatments depends heavily on the amount of experience the clinician possesses. Mathematical modeling can help mitigate this problem by providing an indication of the treatment outcome. Thermal lesions in RFA are affected by the cooling effect of both fine-scale and large-scale blood vessels. The exact model for large-scale blood vessels is advection-diffusion, i.e., a model capable of producing directional effects, which are known to occur in certain cases. In previous research, in situations where directional effects do not occur, the advection term in the blood vessel model has been typically replaced with the Pennes perfusion term, albeit with a higher-than-usual perfusion rate. Whether these values of the perfusion rate appearing in literature are optimal for the particular vessel radii in question, has not been investigated so far. This work aims to address this issue. An attempt has been made to determine, for values of vessel radius between 0.55 mm and 5 mm, best estimates for the perfusion rate which minimize the error in thermal lesion volumes between the perfusion-based model and the advection-based model. The results for the best estimate of the perfusion rate presented may be used in existing methods for fast estimation of RFA outcomes. Furthermore, the possible improvements to the presented methodology have been highlighted.