An experimental method for measuring the electric fields induced by Tumor Treating Fields

Inhalt:
Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) are a novel non-invasive anti-mitotic tumor treatment technique. The electric field distribution induced by TTFields within a specific biological tissue is one of the most significant contributing factors to its clinical effects. However, only a few studies have reported on how to quantitatively measure the spatial EF distribution induced TTFields because of the difficulties in the EF measurement in vivo. This study proposed a method for EF intensity measurement. The method measures the potential difference and calculates the mean peak field intensities at the target using the differential electrodes. The appropriate range of electrode spacing was estimated and determined by the finite element method (FEM). A phantom was designed as the test platform for our proposed method, and the EF intensities were measured at different locations. The range of deviation between measured and corrected simulated values is 2.08% - 6.85%. The preliminary experiment result shows that our measurement platform can provide accurate and reliable EF measurements for TTFields. The proposed method could be used in future in vivo studies for measuring EF induced by TTFields.