Gennaro Giovanni Bellizzi

• Biomedical Engineer
• Researcher at Erasmus MC

Simple Summary Hyperthermia is a thermal cancer treatment that consists of a selective increase in the tumor temperature to a supra-physiological value for 60–90 min. Heating via microwaves using a phased array applicator proved to be a very useful, non-invasive energy carrier. Although hyperthermia is currently employed for many anatomical sites i...

Clinical effectiveness of hyperthermia treatments, in which tumor tissue is artificially heated to 40–44 °C for 60–90 min, can be hampered by a lack of accurate temperature monitoring. The need for noninvasive temperature monitoring in the head and neck region (H&N) and the potential of MR thermometry prompt us to design an MR compatible hypertherm...

Radiative (or far-field) energy replenishment for devices such as smartphones, laptops, robots, and small electric appliances paves the way to autonomous and continuous devices functioning, thus bypassing the need of operation interruptions, human maintenance activities, and replenishment by wired transformers. In this work, we investigate the feas...

In recent years, the research community has dedicated research endeavors in the development and optimization of electromagnetic-based medical technologies (EMTs). These have the potentialities to offer innovative solutions for the diagnosis and/or treatment of unsolved urgent clinical needs: cancer, cardiovascular and aging-related diseases. Novel,...

Purpose To develop a head and neck hyperthermia phased array system compatible with a 1.5 T magnetic resonance (MR) scanner for noninvasive thermometry. Methods We designed a dielectric-parabolic-reflector antenna (DiPRA) based on a printed reflector backed dipole antenna and studied its predicted and measured performance in a flat configuration (...

Background The success of cancer hyperthermia (HT) treatments is strongly dependent on the temperatures achieved in the tumor and healthy tissues as it correlates with treatment efficacy and safety, respectively. Hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) simulations have become pivotal for treatment optimization due to the possibility for pretreatment...

A necessary step when designing electromagnetic-based medical devices is the choice of an optimal matching medium, standing between the patient and the phased array applicator, and the operating frequency. This is crucial to improve the efficiency both from a technical and clinical points of view. In this paper, we propose a new approach, based on...

Temperature monitoring plays a central role in improving clinical effectiveness of adjuvant hyperthermia. The potential of magnetic resonance thermometry for treatment monitoring purposes led to several MR-guided hyperthermia approaches. However, the proposed solutions were sub-optimal due to technological and intrinsic limitations. These hamper ac...

The potential of MR thermometry (MRT) fostered the development of MRI compatible radiofrequency (RF) hyperthermia devices. Such device integration creates major technological challenges and a crucial point for image quality is the water bolus (WB). The WB is located between the patient body and external sources to both couple electromagnetic energy...

Arbitrary shaping the field intensity is a challenging problem relevant in many applications. To date, procedures addressing such a challenging problem have been developed assuming a full knowledge of both the scenario and the target. However, this is not the case in many applications where the medium is only approximately known and/or modeled on t...

Purpose Thermal dose-effect relations have demonstrated that clinical effectiveness of hyperthermia would benefit from more controlled heating of the tumor. Hyperthermia treatment planning (HTP) is a potent tool to study strategies enabling target conformal heating, but its accuracy is affected by patient modeling approximations. Homogeneous phanto...

Quantitative estimation of both conductivity and permittivity of biological tissues is essential in many biomedical applications, ranging from therapeutic treatments to safety assessment of medical devices and dosimetry. Typically, the electromagnetic field distribution inside the body is predicted based on available ex-vivo measured electrical pro...

Clinical outcome of hyperthermia depends on the achieved target temperature, therefore target conformal heating is essential. Currently, invasive temperature probe measurements are the gold standard for temperature monitoring, however, they only provide limited sparse data. In contrast, magnetic resonance thermometry (MRT) provides unique capabilit...

We propose a new approach to the mask-constrained synthesis of shaped beams through generic array antennas having arbitrary layouts and element patterns. The introduced general methodology allows casting the design problem as a finite number of Convex Programming optimizations and can generate different excitation solutions all fulfilling the requi...

Purpose: Hyperthermia treatment quality determines treatment effectiveness as shown by the clinically derived thermal-dose effect relations. SAR based optimization factors are used as possible surrogate for temperature, since they are not affected by thermal tissue properties uncertainty and variations. Previously, target coverage (TC) at the 25% a...

Hyperthermia treatment planning is a deeply patient-specific task which includes the optimal determination of the excitations of an array applicator. To enhance flexibility, various solutions exploiting different frequencies, antenna element, number and applicator geometries have been proposed in the literature. Among them, increasing the frequency...

Clinical trials have shown that hyperthermia is a potent adjuvant to conventional cancer treatments, but the temperatures currently achieved in the clinic are still suboptimal. Hyperthermia treatment planning simulations have potential to improve the heating profile of phased-array applicators. An important open challenge is the development of an e...

The estimation of electrical properties of living biological tissues is relevant to several medical applications ranging from hyperthermia treatment planning to dosimetry and, more in general, is pivotal for a fundamental understanding of bioelectromagnetic interactions. Non-invasive electromagnetic imaging, either based on the processing of electr...

An experimental study is carried out to assess the effect of temperature on the conversion efficiency of Ultra High Frequency energy harvesters based on diode-capacitor Dickson charge pumps, frequently used in self-energizing circuits, such as in radio frequency identification (RF-ID) tags or in wireless sensor nodes. Using off-the-shelf Schottky d...

Generating given 3-D field intensity distributions in a non homogeneous scenario is a canonical problem which is of interest in many applications. On the other side, due to its very challenging nature, very few methods have been proposed up to now in the literature. In this work, starting from the well-known time reversal technique, a simple innova...

Due to the plethora of possible applicative fall-outs, in the recent years several efforts have been made to develop 3-D field intensity shaping methods. While many approaches able to focus a wave-field into a target point are available, a few strategies have been instead developed to generate a field having a given intensity distribution, which is...

Microwave thermal ablation is a cancer treatment that exploits local heating caused by a microwave electromagnetic field to induce coagulative necrosis of tumor cells. Recently, such a technique has significantly progressed in the clinical practice. However, its effectiveness would dramatically improve if paired with a noninvasive system for the re...

In hyperthermia treatments, the possibility of generating a specific absorption rate distribution peaked into the tumor and bounded elsewhere represents the main clinical need. As multi-frequency applicators can be exploited to reduce occurrence of undesired hot-spots, an optimal multi-frequency approach is proposed and discussed. Being formulated...

Magnetic nanoparticle-aided microwave imaging is recently gaining an increasing interest as potential tool for breast cancer diagnostics. This is due to the peculiar features of magnetic nanoparticles, which are biocompatible, can be selectively targeted to the tumor and may change their microwave magnetic response when modulated by a polarizing ma...

A method for constrained focusing or shaping of the Specific Absorption Rate deposition is proposed and discussed. The approach contemporarily takes advantage from multifrequency applicators, which allow a better control of possible hotspots, as well as from the proposed formulation, which allows to reduce the problem to a single or a series of Con...

The capability of controlling the spatial distribution of a field into a given scenario is relevant to many applications as different as hyperthermia treatment planning and wireless network optimization. In this respect, many strategies to focus the field into a target point have been presented, whereas the possibility of arbitrarily shaping a fiel...

3D field shaping is a canonical problem in wave physics that could impact next generation of therapeutic systems. In this framework, we present an innovative and effective strategy that relies on the convex relaxation of the original NP hard problem by taking inspiration from the optimal constrained power focusing method. The formulation presented...

In this communication, we present a full-wave numerical study aimed at showing the potential of microwave tomography as a tool to monitor microwave ablation of solid tumors. The goal is to track the changes in dielectric properties of the tissue undergoing the treatment, in order to appraise the evolving dimension and shape of the thermally ablated...

This paper presents the results of a broadband microwave spectroscopy of a diluted water-based ferrofluid, when subject to an external polarizing magnetic field of variable intensity. The characterization has been performed exploiting a recently proposed measurement approach, specifically devised to enable an accurate measurement of the magnetic pr...

In the framework of medical applications of microwaves, magnetic nanoparticles enhanced microwave imaging represents a promising diagnostic modality. As a matter of fact, it merges the safety, low-cost and portability of microwave technology with the increased specificity enabled by the selective targeting capability of magnetic nanoparticles. In p...