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Hyperthermia Treatment Planning in Clinical Cancer Therapy: Modelling, Simulation and Visualization
(1997)
\noindent The speaker and his co-workers in Scientific Computing and Visualization have established a close cooperation with medical doctors at the Rudolf--Virchow--Klinikum of the Humboldt University in Berlin on the topic of regional hyperthermia. In order to permit a patient--specific treatment planning, a special software system ({\sf\small HyperPlan}) has been developed. \noindent A mathematical model of the clinical system ({\it radio frequency applicator with 8 antennas, water bolus, individual patient body}) involves Maxwell's equations in inhomogeneous media and a so--called bio--heat transfer PDE describing the temperature distribution in the human body. The electromagnetic field and the thermal phenomena need to be computed at a speed suitable for the clinical environment. An individual geometric patient model is generated as a quite complicated tetrahedral ``coarse'' grid (several thousands of nodes). Both Maxwell's equations and the bio--heat transfer equation are solved on that 3D--grid by means of {\em adaptive} multilevel finite element methods, which automatically refine the grid where necessary in view of the required accuracy. Finally optimal antenna parameters for the applicator are determined . \noindent All steps of the planning process are supported by powerful visualization methods. Medical images, contours, grids, simulated electromagnetic fields and temperature distributions can be displayed in combination. A number of new algorithms and techniques had to be developed and implemented. Special emphasis has been put on advanced 3D interaction methods and user interface issues.
The focus of this paper is on the efficient solution of boundary value problems involving the double-- curl operator. Those arise in the computation of electromagnetic fields in various settings, for instance when solving the electric or magnetic wave equation with implicit timestepping, when tackling time--harmonic problems or in the context of eddy--current computations. Their discretization is based on on N\'ed\'elec's {\bf H(curl}; $\Omega$)--conforming edge elements on unstructured grids. In order to capture local effects and to guarantee a prescribed accuracy of the approximate solution adaptive refinement of the grid controlled by a posteriori error estimators is employed. The hierarchy of meshes created through adaptive refinement forms the foundation for the fast iterative solution of the resulting linear systems by a multigrid method. The guiding principle underlying the design of both the error estimators and the multigrid method is the separate treatment of the kernel of the curl--operator and its orthogonal complement. Only on the latter we have proper ellipticity of the problem. Yet, exploiting the existence of computationally available discrete potentials for edge element spaces, we can switch to an elliptic problem in potential space to deal with nullspace of curl. Thus both cases become amenable to strategies of error estimation and multigrid solution developed for second order elliptic problems. The efficacy of the approach is confirmed by numerical experiments which cover several model problems and an application to waveguide simulation.