Tissue Material Property and Lexicon

Background
The thermal medicine community has developed commercially viable technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of a range of diseases, from atrial fibrillation to various types of cancer. But clinical acceptance and implementation of various advances has been irregular due to a lack of confidence in the technologies and varying rates of risk tolerances among clinical disciplines.

Ultimately, low adoption rates these new technologies translates to fewer patients receiving potentially life-saving treatments.
Members of ASME and the Society for Thermal Medicine discussed this topic and its issues, gaps, and hurdles at length and proposed that establishing standards in the following areas will stimulate confidence in new technologies among the clinical community:
  • Methods for validation
  • Terminology
  • Benchmarking of measurement for diagnostic tools
  • Thermal properties of healthy tissues
Current status
ASME established the Thermal Medicine Standards Committee in 2020 with the following Charter:

Develop, review and maintain guidelines and, standards for requirements to improve quality of care in thermal medicine applications.

The TM Standards Committee is initially overseeing two standards activities focused on resolving the lack of consistent terminology within interdisciplinary teams to improve communication between the clinicians and engineers and to expand on the IT’IS Foundation Tissue Material Properties Database to include additional material properties and expansion of temperature dependent values for industry use.

To acheive these goals, the following Subcommittees have been established: 
 
Thermanl Medicine Subcommittee on Lexicon - Develop and maintain Standards for lexicon structure and related topics for therma medicine. 
Thermal Medicine Subcommittee on Tissue Properties - Develop and maintain Standards for tissue properties for thermal medicine. The subcommittee has identified eight material property groups and has established Working Groups to work on the identified materials. A tissue properties template has been created for the development of documents in this area.

Meetings and Events
The TM Standards Committee on Thermal Medicine - meets periodically via teleconference about every 1 -2 months.

For more specific meeting information, please refer to the committee webpages.

Staff Contact
If you’re interested in learning more or participating in these activities, please contact Fred Constantino.
 

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