A Feasibility Study to Mitigate Tissue-Tumor Heterogeneity Using High Frequency Bipolar Electroporation Pulses

Abstract

The accurate modeling of electric fields is important for predicting the volume of treated tissue in electroporation-based therapies (EBTs). In most clinical cases, the electrical properties of tissue are heterogeneous and patient-to-patient and tissue-to-tissue variability makes modeling these parameters complicated. In this study, we propose the use of microsecond bursts of High Frequency Bipolar Electroporation Pulses (HFBEPs) on the order of 1 μs to achieve predictable electric field distributions by reducing effective tissue heterogeneity. For a proof-of-concept we compared in-silico the fields due to the traditional low-frequency electroporation pulses and HFBEPs in a heterogeneous geometry consisting of healthy and tumor liver tissue. We simulated the electric fields in different geometric configurations, i.e. with the tumor centered and offset in the healthy tissue domain and compared the results to the analytical solution of the Laplace’s equation, which is independent of the electrical properties of tissue. In order to quantify the difference, we plotted the fields along the vertical centerline between the two electrodes. We found that that the field distributions using low frequency and high frequency pulses differed from the analytical solution at position (0, 2 cm) by 30% and 7% for the centered tumor and by 53% and 12% for the offset tumor geometry, respectively. These results indicate that HFBEP therapy is more predictable as the field is largely independent of the electrical properties and closely resembles the homogenous analytical solution.