Towards Study on Thermoacoustic Imaging Guided Focused Microwave Therapy for Breast Cancer Treatment

We present preliminary data for a novel platform that integrates focused microwave therapy (FMT) with thermoacoustic imaging (TAI) for mapping temperature, quantifying the heat zone, and guiding the delivery of focused heat. The long-term objectives of this study are to 1) Design and build an image-guided FMT system that is noninvasive, safe and effective for treating small or large locally aggressive solid breast tumors as a possible replacement or complement to invasive surgery; 2) Benchmark performance and optimize TAI-guided FMT platform using in numerical breast phantom and excised tissue. We present the overall system concept, numerical simulations and initial bench-top results related to the proposed platform.