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Abstract
Hyperthermia, the procedure of raising the temperature of tumour-loaded tissue to
40-43 degrees C, is applied as an adjunctive therapy with various established cancer
treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The potential to control power distributions
in vivo has been significantly improved lately by the development of planning systems
and other modelling tools. This increased understanding has led to the design of multiantenna
applicators (including their transforming networks) and implementation of systems
for monitoring of E-fields (eg, electro-optical sensors) and temperature (particularly,
on-line magnetic resonance tomography). Several phase III trials comparing radiotherapy
alone or with hyperthermia have shown a beneficial effect of hyperthermia (with existing
standard equipment) in terms of local control (eg, recurrent breast cancer and malignant
melanoma) and survival (eg, head and neck lymph-node metastases, glioblastoma, cervical
carcinoma). Therefore, further development of existing technology and elucidation
of molecular mechanisms are justified. In recent molecular and biological investigations
there have been novel applications such as gene therapy or immunotherapy (vaccination)
with temperature acting as an enhancer, to trigger or to switch mechanisms on and
off. However, for every particular temperature-dependent interaction exploited for
clinical purposes, sophisticated control of temperature, spatially as well as temporally,
in deep body regions will further improve the potential.