Abstract
Radiofrequency ablation is a minimally-invasive therapy recommended for the treatment of primary and secondary liver cancer in early stages and when resection or transplantation is not feasible. To significantly reduce chances of local recurrences, accurate planning is required, which aims at finding a safe and feasible needle trajectory to an optimal electrode position achieving full coverage of the tumor as well as a safety margin. Computer-assisted algorithms, as an alternative to the time-consuming manual planning performed by the clinicians, commonly neglect the underlying physiology and rely on simplified, spherical or ellipsoidal ablation estimates. To drastically speed up biophysical simulations and enable patient-specific ablation planning, this work investigates the use of non-autoregressive operator learning. The proposed architecture, trained on 1,800 biophysics-based simulations, is able to match the heat distribution computed by a finite-difference solver with a root mean squared error of 0.51 ± 0.50 \(^\circ \)C and the estimated ablation zone with a mean dice score of 0.93 ± 0.05, while being over 100 times faster. When applied to single electrode automatic ablation planning on retrospective clinical data, our method achieves patient-specific results in less than 4 mins and closely matches the finite-difference-based planning, while being at least one order of magnitude faster. Run times are comparable to those of sphere-based planning while accounting for the perfusion of liver tissue and the heat sink effect of large vessels.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
e.g. AngioDynamics StarBurst® system.
References
Altrogge, I., et al.: Towards optimization of probe placement for radio-frequency ablation. In: Larsen, R., Nielsen, M., Sporring, J. (eds.) MICCAI 2006. LNCS, vol. 4190, pp. 486–493. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11866565_60
Audigier, C., et al.: Efficient lattice Boltzmann solver for patient-specific radiofrequency ablation of hepatic tumors. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 34(7), 1576–1589 (2015)
Chaitanya, K., Audigier, C., Balascuta, L.E., Mansi, T.: Automatic planning of liver tumor thermal ablation using deep reinforcement learning. In: Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (2021)
Heimbach, J.K., et al.: AASLD guidelines for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. Hepatology 67(1), 358–380 (2018)
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)
Klinger, H.: Heat transfer in perfused biological tissue-I: general theory. Bull. Math. Biol. 36, 403–415 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02464617
Laimer, G., et al.: Minimal ablative margin (MAM) assessment with image fusion: an independent predictor for local tumor progression in hepatocellular carcinoma after stereotactic radiofrequency ablation. Eur. Radiol. 30(5), 2463–2472 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-019-06609-7
Liang, L., Cool, D., Kakani, N., Wang, G., Ding, H., Fenster, A.: Automatic radiofrequency ablation planning for liver tumors with multiple constraints based on set covering. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 39(5), 1459–1471 (2019)
Lu, L., Jin, P., Pang, G., Zhang, Z., Karniadakis, G.E.: Learning nonlinear operators via deepONet based on the universal approximation theorem of operators. Nat. Mach. Intell. 3(3), 218–229 (2021)
Mariappan, P., et al.: GPU-based RFA simulation for minimally invasive cancer treatment of liver tumours. Int. J. Comput. Assist. Radiol. Surg. 12(1), 59–68 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-016-1469-1
Paszke, A., et al.: PyTorch: an imperative style, high-performance deep learning library. In: Wallach, H., Larochelle, H., Beygelzimer, A., d’ Alché-Buc, F., Fox, E., Garnett, R. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32, pp. 8024–8035. Curran Associates, Inc. (2019)
Payne, S., et al.: Image-based multi-scale modelling and validation of radio-frequency ablation in liver tumours. Philos. Trans. A Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 369(1954), 4233–4254 (2011)
Pennes, H.H.: Analysis of tissue and arterial blood temperatures in the resting human forearm. J. Appl. Physiol. 1(2), 93–122 (1948)
Reig, M., et al.: BCLC strategy for prognosis prediction and treatment recommendation barcelona clinic liver cancer (BCLC) staging system. the 2022 update. J Hepatol. 76(3), 681–693 (2021)
Rieder, C., Kroeger, T., Schumann, C., Hahn, H.K.: GPU-based real-time approximation of the ablation zone for radiofrequency ablation. IEEE Trans. Visual Comput. Graphics 17(12), 1812–1821 (2011)
Sanchez-Gonzalez, A., Godwin, J., Pfaff, T., Ying, R., Leskovec, J., Battaglia, P.: Learning to simulate complex physics with graph networks. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 8459–8468. PMLR (2020)
Sapareto, S.A., Dewey, W.C.: Thermal dose determination in cancer therapy. Int. J. Radiat. Oncol. Biol. Phys. 10(6), 787–800 (1984)
Seitel, A., et al.: Computer-assisted trajectory planning for percutaneous needle insertions. Med. Phys. 38(6), 3246–3259 (2011)
Thuerey, N., Weißenow, K., Prantl, L., Hu, X.: Deep learning methods for Reynolds-averaged Navier-stokes simulations of airfoil flows. AIAA J. 58(1), 25–36 (2020)
Um, K., Brand, R., Fei, Y.R., Holl, P., Thuerey, N.: Solver-in-the-loop: Learning from differentiable physics to interact with iterative PDE-solvers. Adv. Neural. Inf. Process. Syst. 33, 6111–6122 (2020)
Wulff, W.: The energy conservation equation for living tissue. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 6, 494–495 (1974)
Yang, D., et al.: Automatic liver segmentation using an adversarial image-to-image network. In: Descoteaux, M., Maier-Hein, L., Franz, A., Jannin, P., Collins, D.L., Duchesne, Simon (eds.) MICCAI 2017. LNCS, vol. 10435, pp. 507–515. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66179-7_58
Zhang, R., Wu, S., Wu, W., Gao, H., Zhou, Z.: Computer-assisted needle trajectory planning and mathematical modeling for liver tumor thermal ablation: a review. Math. Biosci. Eng. 16(5), 4846–4872 (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
1 Electronic supplementary material
539250_1_En_17_MOESM2_ESM.mp4
Planning result for Case 04 - Illustration of the ablation zone growth over time for the finite-difference model at 4 mm grid resolution (green) and the proposed method (blue). Ablation zones and optimal paths are overlayed with the portal vein (orange) and hepatic vein (yellow).
539250_1_En_17_MOESM3_ESM.mp4
Planning result for Case 04 - Illustration of the temperature distribution over time for the finite-difference model at 4 mm grid resolution (green) and the proposed method (blue). Ablation zones and optimal paths are overlayed with the portal vein (orange) and hepatic vein (yellow).
539250_1_En_17_MOESM4_ESM.mp4
Planning result for Case 07-3 - Illustration of the ablation zone growth over time for the finite-difference model at 4 mm grid resolution (green) and the proposed method (blue). Ablation zones and optimal paths are overlayed with the portal vein (orange) and hepatic vein (yellow).
539250_1_En_17_MOESM5_ESM.mp4
Planning result for Case 07-3 - Illustration of the temperature distribution over time for the finite-difference model at 4 mm grid resolution (green) and the proposed method (blue). Ablation zones and optimal paths are overlayed with the portal vein (orange) and hepatic vein (yellow).
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Meister, F. et al. (2022). Fast Automatic Liver Tumor Radiofrequency Ablation Planning via Learned Physics Model. In: Wang, L., Dou, Q., Fletcher, P.T., Speidel, S., Li, S. (eds) Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2022. MICCAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13437. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16449-1_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16449-1_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16448-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16449-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)