Robust GPU-based Virtual Reality Simulation of Radio Frequency Ablations for Various Needle Geometries and Locations
This work addresses the problem of needle navigation in ablation therapy for trainees and physicians, offering a more robust real-time planning and guidance technique to reduce risks like tumor recurrence, though it appears incremental as it builds on an existing VR simulator.
The paper tackles the challenge of simulating radio-frequency ablations for liver lesions by presenting a GPU-based method that improves accuracy and robustness, achieving significant improvements in Pearson correlations (p < 0.05) and a frame rendering performance of >480 Hz on an Nvidia 1080 Ti GPU.
Purpose: Radio-frequency ablations play an important role in the therapy of malignant liver lesions. The navigation of a needle to the lesion poses a challenge for both the trainees and intervening physicians. Methods: This publication presents a new GPU-based, accurate method for the simulation of radio-frequency ablations for lesions at the needle tip in general and for an existing visuo-haptic 4D VR simulator. The method is implemented real-time capable with Nvidia CUDA. Results: It performs better than a literature method concerning the theoretical characteristic of monotonic convergence of the bioheat PDE and a in vitro gold standard with significant improvements (p < 0.05) in terms of Pearson correlations. It shows no failure modes or theoretically inconsistent individual simulation results after the initial phase of 10 seconds. On the Nvidia 1080 Ti GPU it achieves a very high frame rendering performance of >480 Hz. Conclusion: Our method provides a more robust and safer real-time ablation planning and intraoperative guidance technique, especially avoiding the over-estimation of the ablated tissue death zone, which is risky for the patient in terms of tumor recurrence. Future in vitro measurements and optimization shall further improve the conservative estimate.