Sparsity Promoted Antenna Selection in Hyperthermia Treatment Planning

Since the cost of hyperthermia equipment is largely dependent on the number of amplifiers, new applicators are being developed that allow to exploit during treatment only a subset of antennas among those constituting the device. The selection of the optimal subset is a part of the treatment planning procedure and requires proper approaches to be carried out. In this contribution, we propose and test a new procedure that pursues the selection goal by embedding the sparsity promotion paradigm within an optimal treatment planning approach based on constrained power optimization. Thanks to such an integration, the proposed approach enables the simultaneous selection of the optimum antennas subset and the determination of their excitation feeding for maximizing target SAR while constraining the SAR elsewhere.