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Magnetic scaffolds have been investigated as promising tools for the interstitial hyperthermia treatment of bone cancers, to control local recurrence by enhancing radio- and chemotherapy effectiveness. The potential of magnetic scaffolds motivates the development of production strategies enabling tunability of the resulting magnetic properties. Within this framework, deposition and drop-casting of magnetic nanoparticles on suitable scaffolds offer advantages such as ease of production and high loading, although these approaches are often associated with a non-uniform final spatial distribution of nanoparticles in the biomaterial. The implications and the influences of nanoparticle distribution on the final therapeutic application have not yet been investigated thoroughly. In this work, poly-caprolactone scaffolds are magnetized by loading them with synthetic magnetic nanoparticles through a drop-casting deposition and tuned to obtain different distributions of magnetic nanoparticles in the biomaterial. The physicochemical properties of the magnetic scaffolds are analyzed. The microstructure and the morphological alterations due to the reworked drop-casting process are evaluated and correlated to static magnetic measurements. THz tomography is used as an innovative investigation technique to derive the spatial distribution of nanoparticles. Finally, multiphysics simulations are used to investigate the influence on the loading patterns on the interstitial bone tumor hyperthermia treatment.

Magnetic nanoparticles-enhanced microwave imaging has been recently proposed to overcome the limitations of conventional microwave imaging methods for breast cancer monitoring. In this paper, we discuss how to tackle the linear inverse scattering problem underlying this novel technique in an effective way. In particular, our aim is to minimize the required a priori patient-specific information, avoid occurrence of false positives, and keep the computational burden low. By relying on an extensive numerical analysis in realistic conditions, we show that the method can provide accurate and reliable images without information on the inner structure of the inspected breast and with an only rough knowledge of its shape. Notably, this allows moving to an offline stage the computationally intensive part of the image formation procedure. In addition, we show how to appraise the total amount of magnetic contrast agent targeted in the tumor.

In this paper, a microwave technique for breast cancer imaging is presented. The approach is based on the use of magnetic nanoparticles as contrast agent to induce a nonnull magnetic contrast selectively localized within the tumor. This allows us to face cancer imaging as the reconstruction of a magnetic contrast from the corresponding scattered field. To extract, from the measured data the contribution due to the magnetic contrast, i.e., the signal meaningful for cancer imaging, the approach exploits the possibility of modulating the magnetic response of magnetic nanoparticles by means of a polarizing magnetic field. The achievable reconstruction capabilities and the robustness against uncertainties on the electric features of the surrounding electric scenario are assessed by means of numerical examples.