Being minimally invasive and highly effective, radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is widely used for small size malignant tumors treatment. However, in clinical practice, a large number of tumors are found in irregular shape, while the current RFA devices are hard to control their morphologic appearance of RFA lesions on demand, which usually ends up excessively ablating the tissues and often brings excessively irreversible damage to the organs’ functions. Here, we introduce active cannulas for each of individually-controlled sub-electrodes to achieve an on-demand shape morphing and thus conformal RFA lesion. The shape as well as the length of inserted sub-electrode can be precisely controlled by tuning the expanded length of the active stylet and relative position of the active cannula. Furthermore, owing to independent movement and energy control of each sub-electrodes, our electrode is shown to be not only efficient enough to accomplish accurate trajectory to target tissue in a single insertion, but also adaptive enough to ablate target tissues with diverse morphologic appearances and locations. Potentially, our RFA electrode is a better choice in the future clinical practice for minimally invasive treatments of malignant tumors of which preferred treatment is conformal ablation.

Corresponding author(s) Email:    zgwu@hust.edu.cn