Hee Chang Shin
BME MS Thesis Defense Presentation
Date: 2025-03-18
Time: 2 PM - 4 PM
Location / Meeting Link: UAW McIntire Conference Room

Committee Members:
Dr. Rafael Davalos - Department of Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Mark Prausnitz - School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Dr. Aniruddh Sarkar - Department of Biomedical Engineering


Title: Cycled Pulsing for Prostate Tumor to Mitigate Thermal Damage, While Conserving the Ablation Area

Abstract:
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancer-related diseases among men. Traditional treatment options can treat the disease successfully, but limitations and complications exist since the traditional treatments lack specificity and have an invasive nature. Focal therapy is a prominent option to address the existing problem since it is minimally invasive and targets a specific region of the tumor. Most focal therapy techniques involve thermal ablation, which can cause thermal damage to the surrounding tissue, vasculatures, and nerves. Irreversible electroporation is a non-thermal technique developed to deliver electric pulses and create permanent nanopores in cell membranes, which would lead to apoptosis and cell death. IRE is predominantly a non-thermal technique, but the thermal effect of Joule heating exists during treatment. Cycled pulsing of IRE is a technique to mitigate thermal damage through partitioning of pulses and adding interpulse delays. The experiment aimed to investigate the effects of segmenting the pulses and adding delays to the regular IRE pulses to determine the temperature fluctuation and therapeutic efficacy. The partitioning of pulses and interpulse delays decreased the temperature during the IRE treatment. The ablation areas of the experimental groups were maintained in close range to the control group. The lethal electric field threshold did not increase with the variables. Segmenting the pulses and adding the delays were effective at dissipating thermal damage while maintaining the therapeutic efficacy.