The prognosis for patients with advanced head and neck (H&N) cancer is very poor and treatment is challenging. These patients are standardly treated with radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy. These treatments are associated with a high treatment related late toxicity that affects the quality of life and social contacts in 20% of the patients. Side effects reported in all studies concern loss of swallowing and salivary function leading to difficulties in speaking and eating. Clinical studies have shown that the addition of a local hyperthermia treatment to a (chemo)radiation treatment signifcantly improve the treatment outcome without increasing treatment related late toxicity. Application of hyperthermia in the challenging H&N region using multi antenna-element applicators requires hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP). This thesis focuses on the development of an accurate and efficient patient model generation for patient-specific HTP based on electromagnetic (EM) and temperature modeling. The first two chapters include the automatic generation of 3D patient-models from Computed Tomography (CT) scans (chapter 2) or CT and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans (chapter 3). Chapter 4 and 5 include temperature simulation guided H&N hyperthermia using optimized thermal tissue property values.

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G.C. van Rhoon (Gerard) , M.M. Paulides (Maarten)
This research was financially supported by the Technology Foundation STW (grant 10846).
Erasmus University Rotterdam
hdl.handle.net/1765/93206
Department of Radiation Oncology

Verhaart, R. (2016, October 4). Patient Modeling for Simulation Guided Head and Neck Hyperthermia. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/93206