Feasibility of Concentric Electrodes in Contact Irreversible Electroporation for Superficial Lesion Treatment

Contact irreversible electroporation (IRE) is a method for ablating cells by applying electric pulses via surface electrodes in contact with a target tissue. To facilitate the application of the contact IRE to superficial lesion treatment, this study further extended the ablation depth, which had been limited to a 400-μm depth in our previous study, by using concentric electrodes.

A prototype device of concentric electrodes was manufactured using a Teflon-coated copper wire inserted in a copper tube. The ablation area was experimentally determined using a tissue phantom comprising 3D cultured fibroblasts and compared with the electric field distribution obtained using numerical analyses.

Experiments showed that cells 540 μm from the surface of the tissue phantom were necrotized by the application of 150 pulses at 100 V. The outline of the ablation area agreed well with the contour line of 0.4 kV/cm acquired by the analyses. The ablation depth predicted for the concentric electrode using this critical electric field was 1.4 times deeper than that for the parallel electrode. For the actual application of treatment, a multiple-electrode device that bundles several pairs of concentric electrodes was developed, and confirmed that to be effective for treating wide areas with a single treatment.

The electric field estimated by the analyses with the experimentally determined threshold confirmed that concentric electrodes could attain a deeper ablation than parallel electrodes.

Using the concentric electrodes, we were able to localize ablation to specific target cells with much less damage to neighboring cells.