Patient-Specific Planning of Transarterial Drug Delivery for Liver Cancer: Modelling Drug Particle Transport and Catheter Accessibility

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of primary liver cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. During transarterial therapies for the treatment of unresectable HCC, a catheter is navigated through the hepatic arteries and radio- or chemo-embolization particles are released as close as possible to the tumor. The goal of this research project is to develop and validate a personalized modelling approach to optimize patient-specific planning for transarterial drug delivery in the liver. 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) will allow simulating the blood flow and particle distribution in patient-specific hepatic vasculatures and determine the impact of clinically variable parameters (e.g. injection location and velocity, particle size, etc.) to optimize the treatment outcome. These numerical models will be validated through a combination of in vivo imaging and in vitro experimental methods. Since it is often challenging to navigate catheters deeply into the dense and tortuous arterial tree of the liver, vascular access of the arterial network will be determined for catheters with certain pre-defined limitations (e.g. size, flexibility). By combining CFD and vascular accessibility maps, the most upstream injection locations (i.e. high target-specificity, minimal offsite-toxicity, high accessibility) can be identified for each patient, which is a crucial step towards improving the treatment response to transarterial therapies.