When in the future improved and more flexible heating equipment becomes available, and when hyperthermia is applied more routinely, computerized simulations of treatments will become commonplace, as they are in radia tion therapy. For hyperthermia, however, such simulations will be used not only for the traditional role of planning patient treatment, but also for three other applications not needed in radiation therapy - the comparative evalu ation of equipment, feedback control during treatment, and the post-treat ment evaluation of therapy. The present simulations of hyperthermia are crude...

The development of equipment capable of producing and monitoring safe, effective and predictable hyperthermia treatments represents a major challenge. The main problem associated with any heating technique is the need to adjust and control the distribution of absorbed power in the tissue during treatment. Power distribution is considered adequate only when tumor tissue can be maintained at the required hyperthermic levels while, at the same time, healthy tissue is not overheated. This problem is particularly crucial when external heating devices are used to produce hyperthermia. Ex ternal...

The enormous potential that hyperthermia has for benefiting patients with cancer is impressively indicated by biological studies, both in vitro and in vivo, and by comparative clinical studies whenever the heat has been appro priate to the size of the tumor. But hyperthermia, as with any other technologically based medical procedures, requires an extensive develop ment of sophisticated instrumentation and techniques to offer routine clinical benefit. We probably erred in starting clinical trials so soon. We had hoped that by showing the clinical benefits on some superficial tumors quickly,...

"Internal" hyperthermia is a type of thermotherapy by which heat is sup plied to tumor tissue in situ. There are three different techniques for pro viding internal hyperthermia: (1) interstitial hyperthermia using implanted needle probes, (2) intracavitary hyperthermia using probes introduced into natural body cavities, and (3) perfusional hyperthermia by means of ex tracorporal blood heating. Compared with external hyperthermia, internal hyperthermia has been preferentially accepted by oncologists because it can be more easily combined with other forms of treatment, e. g., interstitial...

Studies on the effects of hyperthermia have aroused great interest in recent years. On the one hand, it has been demonstrated. that hyperthermia may be a useful treatment modality for tumors, in combination with ionizing radia tion or cytotoxic drugs. On the other hand, it is of great scientific interest to study the effects of increased temperature on biological systems. Although hyperthermia has been used in the treatment of cancer for cen turies, its therapeutic success was doubtful. However, since it has been shown that radiation-induced cell killirtg can be remarkably enhanced by...

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