IT’IS Paper Selected for the June 2018 Cover of Veterinary and Comparative Oncology

The paper “Novel hyperthermia applicator system allows adaptive treatment planning: Preliminary clinical results in tumour-bearing animals” by S. Dressel, M.C. Gosselin, M.H. Capstick, E. Carrasco, M.S. Weyland, S. Scheidegger, E. Neufeld, N. Kuster, S. Bodis, and C. Rohrer Bley was selected for the cover image of the June 2018 issue of the journal Veterinary and Comparative Oncology (VCO). In this original article, the effectiveness and safety of a novel hyperthermia (HT) system used to treat tumor-bearing dogs and cats in terms of local response and toxicity are presented, and the predicted responses are compared with experimental data.

The image selected for the cover shows two 3D renderings – made with the HT treatment-planning tool – of a novel applicator module placed in an optimized position on the tumor of a feline animal patient. Guided by the patient-specific planning tool, which integrates a closed-loop temperature-feedback control system, thermal HT treatments were applied to the vaccine-associated sarcoma located on the right caudodorsal abdominal wall of the patient. The planning tool, which was developed within the computational life sciences platform Sim4Life (ZMT Zurich MedTech AG (ZMT), Switzerland), works in tandem with iSEG (ZMT), a medical image segmentation toolset, to segment the animal and semi-automatically optimize the placement of the applicator system. A dedicated field optimizer is used to determine personalized steering parameters, perform the analysis for applicator placement, and provide visualization functionality. The application of both the patient specific treatment-planning tool and the closed-loop feedback control system simultaneously ensures that the HT treatment applied corresponds to the outcome predicted. The system facilitates HT treatments that are individually adaptive, flexible, and safe.

VCO, an international, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal with a focus on the etiology, diagnosis, clinical course, and prevention of cancer in domestic animals, is the official journal of the Veterinary Cancer Society as well as of several regional societies of veterinary oncology.

It is a great honor to have an image from a paper selected to grace the cover of this high-quality journal!