WS3: Translating Microwave Medical Devices from Research Bench to Patient Bedside

Organisers

M. O’Halloran, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland

R. Conceição, University of Oxford, UK and Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

Research in Microwave imaging and therapeutic in Europe has reached critical mass, with many research groups rapidly progressing towards pilot clinical studies. To date, the research has been primarily driven by engineers, with little or no input from clinicians or patients. In order for the clinical adoption of the technology, several important topics must be considered:

1. Refinement and optimisation of hardware and software systems prior to pilot patient studies;

2. Design and fabrication of standard phantoms, allowing for direct comparisons to be made between competing systems (a process previously adopted by other emerging imaging modalities);

3. Careful design of pilot clinical studies to produce clinically-meaningful results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology. 

In this session, groups who have direct experience dealing with these issues will present their work, highlighting the potential of the technology, while also helping more junior researchers to avoid common pitfalls. The impact of the session will be a much more informed research community where the translation from “research bench to patient bedside” will be much less daunting.

The workshop will take the form of a series of interactive translational case-studies, where leaders in the field will describe their experience in terms of system refinement, phantom testing and clinical trial design and implementation. These case-studies will span a wide variety of topics ranging from practical considerations in terms of device design (safety and comfort) to patient recruitment, securing ethical approval, design of the clinical trial and interpretation of results. These case-studies will span a wide variety of microwave medical devices:

1. Microwave tomography for breast cancer detection, Paul Meaney, University of Dartmouth, USA
2. Stroke detection using Microwave signal classification, Andreas Fhager, University of Chalmers, Sweden
3. Respiration monitoring using UWB Radar, Jürgen Sachs, Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany
4. Confocal Microwave Imaging for breast cancer imaging, Martin O'Halloran, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland
5. Microwave Hyperthermia for Cancer Treatment, Gerard Van Rhoon and Maarten Paulides, Erasmus MC Cancer Institute, Netherlands
6. Emerging applications of Microwave Imaging and Therapeutics, Lorenzo Crocco, National Research Council, Italy.