Hyperthermia

Hyperthermia is rapidly becoming the fourth modality of cancer treatment, at least a useful adjuvant to radiation therapy, chemotherapy or surgery; at best, a new therapeutic form that, properly used, may open new horizons in the fight against this dreadful disease. The staging is still primitive. The devices used are after laboratory improvisations, and lack the precision and definition of treatment fields that will allow mass use of the modality. Clinical practices are limited to the procedural evaluations of a few pioneer groups, and basic understanding of its mechanism of action, although progressing by leaps and bounds is still short of perfection. The challenge and the promise are there, and because of this, engineers, physicists, biologists, physiologists and clinicians from different specialties have a basic need for interaction, both in terms of exchange of scientific information and peer review of results and clinical trials. To satisfy this need, to act as a clearinghouse of knowledge and a forum for discussion, the North American Hyperthermia Group (NAHG) has been formed. The meeting in Detroit in August 1981 represents the first gathering of the group, to be followed by a second in Salt Lake City in April 1982. The Detroit meeting was mostly devoted to the physiology and clinical problems associated with Hyperthermia, although physics and basic thermobiology were also discussed. 75 scientists attended the meeting and 30 papers were presented. A selection of these papers represents this volume, offered more as a statement of problems than a final solution to them.