RESUMO
According to the World Health Organization, cancer is a worldwide health problem. Its high mortality rate motivates scientists to study new treatments. One of these new treatments is hyperthermia using magnetic nanoparticles. This treatment consists in submitting the target region with a low-frequency magnetic field to increase its temperature over 43 °C, as the threshold for tissue damage and leading the cells to necrosis. This paper uses an in silico three-dimensional Pennes' model described by a set of partial differential equations (PDEs) to estimate the percentage of tissue damage due to hyperthermia. Differential evolution, an optimization method, suggests the best locations to inject the nanoparticles to maximize tumor cell death and minimize damage to healthy tissue. Three different scenarios were performed to evaluate the suggestions obtained by the optimization method. The results indicate the positive impact of the proposed technique: a reduction in the percentage of healthy tissue damage and the complete damage of the tumors were observed. In the best scenario, the optimization method was responsible for decreasing the healthy tissue damage by 59% when the nanoparticles injection sites were located in the non-intuitive points indicated by the optimization method. The numerical solution of the PDEs is computationally expensive. This work also describes the implemented parallel strategy based on CUDA to reduce the computational costs involved in the PDEs resolution. Compared to the sequential version executed on the CPU, the proposed parallel implementation was able to speed the execution time up to 84.4 times.