ABSTRACT
The ability to calculate some quantifiable description of thermal treatments is essential if hyperthermia is to become a routinely accepted and widely used modality for the treatment of cancer. The first problem is to develop the ability to quantitate the temperature as a function of time for any single point within the volume of interest into a number representative of the ‘dose’ of heat at that point. The second problem is to develop a means of converting this three-dimensional ‘dose’ map into a clinically useful description of the hyperthermia treatment which can be correlated with response. The influence of radiation therapy has suggested the use of energy deposition as a dose unit for heat. The simplest description of temperature and time is an integration of the temperature above a given initial temperature times the time spent at that temperature. The relationship between temperature and exposure time during hyperthermic treatments has been reported for a variety of biological systems.
