The future of hyperthermia

The major drawback of thermotherapy still is the poor reproducibility of clinical results. Many consider that this is mainly due to differences in body temperature. Hence a good knowledge of spatial and temporal temperature distribution is a prerequisite to any further clinical progress. In particular, this would enable us to establish dose-effect relationships for normal human tissue reactions and therefore to push heating up to near the threshold of tissue tolerance. The current clinical results are promising but time has come for controlled clinical studies, which are the only means we have to evaluate the various methods and combinations and to choose the optimum sequencing and scheduling.