Non-invasive temperature prediction of in vitro therapeutic ultrasound signals using neural networks

Med Biol Eng Comput. 2006 Mar;44(1-2):111-6. doi: 10.1007/s11517-005-0004-2.

Abstract

In this paper, a novel black-box modelling scheme applied to non-invasive temperature prediction in a homogeneous medium subjected to therapeutic ultrasound is presented. It is assumed that the temperature in a point of the medium is non-linearly related to some spectral features and one temporal feature, extracted from the collected RF-lines. The black-box models used are radial basis functions neural networks (RBFNNs), where the best-fitted models were selected from the space of model structures using a genetic multi-objective strategy. The best-fitted predictive model presents a maximum absolute error less than 0.4 degrees C in a prediction horizon of approximately 2 h, in an unseen data sequence. This work demonstrates that this type of black-box model is well-suited for punctual and non-invasive temperature estimation, achieving, for a single point estimation, better results than the ones presented in the literature, encouraging research on multi-point non-invasive temperature estimation.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Body Temperature*
  • Humans
  • Hyperthermia, Induced
  • Models, Biological
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Ultrasonic Therapy*