Toward Large Ablations With Single-Needle High-Frequency Irreversible Electroporation in Vivo

Irreversible electroporation (IRE) is a minimally thermal tissue ablation modality used to treat solid tumors adjacent to critical structures. Widespread clinical adoption of IRE has been limited due to complicated anesthetic management requirements and technical demands associated with placing multiple needle electrodes in anatomically challenging environments. High-frequency irreversible electroporation (H-FIRE) delivered using a novel single-insertion bipolar probe system could potentially overcome these limitations, but ablation volumes have remained small using this approach. While H-FIRE is minimally thermal in mode of action, high voltages or multiple pulse trains can lead to unwanted Joule heating. In this work, we improve the H-FIRE waveform design to increase the safe operating voltage using a single-insertion bipolar probe before electrical arcing occurs. By uniformly increasing interphase ( d