Simulation study on IRE ablation of breast tumors with multi-electrode

Irreversible electroporation (IRE) can be used to ablate tumors when a high constant electric field is applied by using two-electrode or multi-electrode inserted in the tumors. The electroporation effect of biological tissue will make the electrical conductivity of biological tissue will increase with the increase of the electric field inside the tissue. We constructed a breast tumor model, and the Heaviside function was introduced in our study to characterize the relationship between the conductivity of the breast tumor tissue and the electrical field intensity. To achieve complete tumor ablation, we considered two-needle, three-needle, and four-needle electrode configurations of the model. The pulse used in this paper is the monopolar pulses with a pulse width of 100 μs. The results that the ablation area of tumors increased with the increase of the number of electrode. In the four-needle electrode configuration, the ablation zone almost can cover the entire tumor model. The research results have strong guiding significance for the application of multi-needle electrode in the clinical ablation of tumors.