Alpha Development of Software for 3D Segmentation and Reconstruction of Medical Images for Use in Pre-treatment Simulations for Electrochemotherapy: Implementation and Case Study

Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the world. Several treatments are used against this disease. Chemotherapy is a drug treatment against cancer, but it is a slow process with several side effects. Electroporation (EP) is a technique that allows increasing cell permeability by applying high-intensity electrical pulses for short periods and can be used to speed up the chemotherapeutic process, resulting in Electrochemotherapy (ECT). ECT is a well-known technique for the treatment of superficial tumors and is being developed for deep-seated tumors. Pre-treatment simulations are reasonable solutions to predict whether the electric field intensity will be high enough throughout the tumor mass. This article presents a software development to segment and to export biological 3D structures from a medical image to an electric field simulator. A realistic lung tumor was in silico studied using ECT with electrodes proposed by the ESOPE protocol. The results demonstrate that multiple applications of the electrodes eliminate the tumor. Evaluation of the required electric current and electric field distribution allows the development of new electrodes and equipment in real applications of ECT treatment.