Almost a decade has passed ever since the first time nanoparticles were proposed to be used for tumor/cancer diagnosis and treatment. For tumor/cancer treatments, nanoparticles are usually engineered to be the photo-thermal agent to promote the selectivity of the photo-thermal therapy while the most promising diagnostic applica- tion for nanoparticles might be being used as the exogenous optical contrast agent for optical imaging technique. This study is targeted at developing numerical modeling & simulation to be a subsidiary tool of experimental investigation of diagnostic & therapeutic applications of nanoparticles, particularly, gold-silica nanoshells. Around this goal, the present study is comprised with four sub-projects, each would be presented as an independent chapter.
Firstly, an alternative method for calculating the spatial distribution of interstitial fluence rate in laser-induced interstitial thermo-therapy is introduced. The method originates from the un-simplified integral-differential radiant transport equa- tion, which is then solved by the radial basis function collocation technique. Validation of the method against the stochastic Monte Carlo and the numerical finite volume method has been done. Secondly, the nanoparticle assisted laser-induced interstitial thermo-therapy for tumor/cancer treatments is numerically investigated, which was targeted at exploring the therapeutic effects of a variety of treatment conditions including laser wavelength, power, exposure time, concentrations of tailored nanoparticles, and optical/thermal properties of the tissue that is under the treatment. Thirdly, the feasibility of extending nanoparticle assisted photo-thermal therapy from treating subcutaneous tumors to treating organ tumors, particularly, tumors growing in the clearance organ liver has been investigated. For organ tumors, nanoparticles could not recognize tumors from the surrounding normal organ tissue very well, as what has been for subcutaneous tumors. And last, how gold-silica nanoshells alter the diffuse reflectance signature of tissue phantoms has been numerically investigated, for the purpose of exploring how to engineering nanoshells to be good exogenous optical contrast agent for early-staged cancer diagnostic imaging.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/71704 |
| Date | 24 July 2013 |
| Creators | Xu, Xiao |
| Contributors | Meade, Andrew J., Bayazitoglu, Yildiz |
| Source Sets | Rice University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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