Hyperthermia is one of the successful adjuvant cancer therapy in which temperature of
cancer tissues are targetedly elevated to 40 - 45℃ and maintained for 60 minute typically. In
this work, limitations of existing microwave based applicator for delivering hyperthermia
treatment are addressed. Advanced stages of localized cancers such as oral and breast cancers
require antenna with large electric field size and deep penetration of several cm which are not
currently possible with the exsisting designs. Another issue with hyperthermia treatment is the
use of invasive temperature probes for thermometry. Integrating non-invasive thermometry
technique like magnetic resoance imaging is complex and not affordable. There are no
affordable alternate non-invasive techniques adopted in the clinic to capture spatiotemporal
variation of deep tissue temperature during hyperthermia treatment delivery. In this work, we
propose design and development of microwave antennas of varying sizes operating at 434 MHz
(lowerst license free band in India) with improved penetration depth for treatment of localized
large cancers using novel design strategies. We also investigate the ability to estimate deep
tissue temperature using diagnostic ultrasound scan images and integrate the ultrasound
trasducer with microwave hyperthermia applicator. Further, we propose the design of water
loaded electromagnetic metamaterial that is transparent to ultrasound waves and improves the
penetration depth of the raidated EM waves in biological tissues. The performance of the
improved microwave antennas integrated with EM metamaterial and ultrasound transducer will
be validated on tissue mimicking phantoms.
KEYWORDS: Microwaves antennas, hyperthermia, near field antenna, ultrasound
thermometry, electromagnetic metamaterials, flat lenses, cancer therapy