Abstract
Studies have shown a positive correlation between the effective temperature maintained inside a cancerous tumor during hyperthermia treatments and the response rate of that tumor to subsequent radiation therapy (see, for example, [1]). In addition, effective temperature control is crucial to avoid the premature abortion of hyperthermia treatments from patient discomfort due to overheating of the normal tissue surrounding these tumors. Hence, there is a need to optimally heat tumors and surrounding tissue — this is significantly affected by the choice of actuator placement and input powers. In this work, we show how the extended balanced realization model reduction approach [2] can be employed to efficiently determine the optimal scan path for a given hyperthermia treatment.
