Offset-free Model Predictive Control for Enhancing MR-HIFU Hyperthermia in Cancer Treatment

In this paper, an offset-free MPC scheme is developed to improve performance and robustness of temperature control in magnetic resonance-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound hyperthermia cancer treatments. The proposed design effectively handles constraints and exploits the body’s thermal behavior to achieve faster and more evenly distributed heating of the tumor leading to improved treatment quality with respect to the methods currently applied in clinics. The proposed scheme incorporates disturbance estimation to remove the steady-state offset resulting from plant-model mismatch, which for the given healthcare application is inevitable in practice due to the large physiological diversity in patients and tumors. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate this algorithm’s capability to improve robust performance.