3D assessment of irreversible electroporation treatments in vegetal models

Abstract

In the last years irreversible electroporation techniques (IRE) has started to gain importance exponentially in the medicine field, from being considered as an undesirable side-effect of reversible electroporation treatments to being considered nowadays as a viable treatment against cancer by its right own. IRE treatments are based in electroporation, electrical pulses are delivered to damage the cell membranes and cause the cell death. It has numerous advantages compared with other ablation techniques since is a non-thermal ablation, thus, the tissue scaffold is spared when the treatment is applied. Is possible to predict the extension and shape of the treatment by means of mathematical simulations, the models used to predict that have been experimentally refined. We present an improved method to evaluate in three-dimensions the results of IRE using vegetal models. The technique consists on using a dye solution to enhance the IRE area in sliced potato tubers. After slice digitalization, the electroporated area was automatically identified and the resulting treated volume was calculated. In addition, a threedimensional/nreconstruction of both healthy tissue and IRE volume was generated. The proposed evaluation technique was used to assess different pulse protocols outcomes. Finally, numerical simulations had been carried out to compare the numerical predictions to the experimental observations. The obtained results shows a clearly match between experimental and simulated volumes/nconfirming the reliability of the method proposed.