ABSTRACT
Cancer therapy today demands delivery of adequate doses of anti-tumor agents to tumors while sparing (surrounding) normal tissues. Radiation therapy, as an example, with high energy machines, delivers significant radiation doses to deep-seated structures and spares overlying skin to a great degree. The use of hyperthermia as an adjuvant treatment modality has been limited by difficulties in localizing the heat to specific tumor tissues. Since many tumors are located deep relative to the skin surface, new techniques must be developed which enable delivery of hyperthermia to deep-seated tumors while avoiding injury to adjacent normal structures. Canine liver was chosen as an appropriate model because unresectable liver tumors are fatal in spite of new treatment techniques that have been developed. Interstitial hyperthermia of the lung has proven to be a potentially important application of this technique because of physiologic differences between tumor and normal tissue.
