Robust control of temperature during local hyperthermia of cancerous tumors

Abstract

Local hyperthermia is one of the most common methods to treat cancerous tumors, near the skin surface or natural body orifices. In order to study the problem of temperature control during local hyperthermia, firstly the heat conduction process during this therapy is analytically modeled by a time-delayed fractional-order transfer function, parametrized with respect to the body temperature. Since the body temperature may vary under the influence of patient physiological reaction and heat source, a robustness criterion is proposed to achieve the phase margin invariance despite of the temperature variations. Afterwards, an analytical method is proposed to tune stabilizing FO-PI/PD controllers for desirably adjusting the values of phase margin and gain crossover frequency, where the suggested robustness feature is satisfied in temperature control during the treatment. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the paper achievements, by using practical parameters numerical simulation results are presented. © 2019 European Control Association