| Tissue ablation with minimally invasive surgery is important for treatment of many diseases and has an increasing role in treatment of solid neoplasms. A variety of biophysical and biochemical processes are used for this purpose. They include thermal ablation with heating, cooling or freezing, electroporation (pulsed electric fields), injection of chemical agents, photodynamic effects, sonoporation effects and many others.;Electrolysis, the passage of a low magnitude direct ionic current through the tissue, between two electrodes, is a biochemical/biophysical process that has been considered for tissue ablation since the 19th century. Electrolysis affects the ionic species in tissue, which change into compounds that can ablate cells. The advantage of electrolysis in comparison to other ablation techniques can be attributed to its simplicity and low cost of instrumentation, which might make it a suitable treatment modality for resource constrained communities where more expensive medical treatment is often not available.;Electrolytic effects have been conveniently ignored by earlier work focusing on pulsed electric fields. The induced fields were considered brief enough and the resulting currents small enough to ignore changes in pH occurring due to electrolytic processes arising in the tissue. Recent research findings however, indicate that under some practical conditions, the observed effects which were believed to be driven by reversible electroporation can be traced to electrolysis.;This dissertation is primarily focused on electrolytic effects occurring during electric stimulation of living tissues and the development of innovative research tools that enable characterization and research of these effects. The dissertation covers three main parts: first the fundamental phenomena and the necessary conditions are characterized. The second part focuses on research tools design and development. These tools allow to study electrolytic effects during electro-stimulation via imaging (EIT,MRI) and mathematical models. Finally, the last part focuses on application development -- two novel applications are proposed which take the electrolytic effects into account. The first application leverages the electrolytic effects in order to make electroporation more efficient, and the second application prevents electrolytic effects by using capacitative coupling of the electrodes to the electroporated medium. |
