Figure 1.

HT induces thermal dose-dependent HNSCC spheroid volume growth delay: (a) Representative image series of FaDu and SAS spheroids upon exposure to HT demonstrate the impact of various thermal doses on spheroid growth. (b) Effect of different hyperthermia treatments and thermal doses, respectively, on FaDu and SAS spheroid volume growth up to 14 day of post-treatment. Data show means (±SD) of ∑n ≥ 56 spheroids per treatment arm from N = 2 independent experiments. The dotted line indicates the relative value for 5 × V₀. (c) Mean relative spheroid growth delay (±SD) induced by different thermal doses calculated from the data presented in (b) as the extended time to reach 5× pre-treatment spheroid volume (5 × V₀) is shown to enable the comparison of the different spheroid types; treatment arms were normalized to the respective untreated controls. The Mann-Whitney U test was applied to estimate statistical significance of the relative growth delay (treated versus control spheroids) based on the pooled data; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.