Reversible & Irreversible Electroporation Evidence Map
This portal brings the two regimes of electroporation, reversible and irreversible, into a single searchable evidence base. The principal clinical application of the reversible regime is electrochemotherapy (RE-ECT); the irreversible regime is the ablation method known by the code IRE-ECT. The corpus holds 2529 publications, spans 1991–2026 and is divided into 21 anatomical and clinical application areas.
What Is Electroporation?
When electric pulses of sufficient strength and controlled duration are applied to a cell membrane, transiently permeable regions form in the lipid bilayer. This phenomenon is called electroporation. Once the applied field strength rises above a threshold, the permeability becomes permanent and the cell dies.
These two regimes underpin two entirely different treatment strategies. In the reversible regime the aim is not to kill the cell but to let a cytotoxic drug that normally cannot cross the membrane enter it; this is electrochemotherapy. In the irreversible regime the electric field itself is the ablative agent and no drug is used.
The two agents most often used in electrochemotherapy are bleomycin and cisplatin. Bleomycin is a large hydrophilic molecule that crosses an intact membrane only with difficulty. Under electroporation its intracellular accumulation rises by several hundred fold in the literature, sharply raising local cytotoxicity without increasing the systemic dose.
The subject of this portal is the reversible regime. Irreversible electroporation (IRE-ECT) is a different regime that ablates directly without a drug and appears in the corpus as comparative context; it is covered on its own page.
Scientific Application Areas
Each card shows the area’s reversible and irreversible publication counts and the evidence level derived automatically from the corpus. Two areas without an anatomical location (General Principles & Biophysics and Devices & Clinical Trials) are absent from the hologram above and are reachable only from this directory.
How Was This Portal Built?
Bibliographic data (year, authors, title, DOI/PMID) was parsed from the filenames of the source PDF archive; journal, abstract and publication type were resolved by DOI/PMID via PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC and OpenAlex. Where no index held a record, the abstract was extracted directly from the source PDF. 2383 records carry an abstract; for the 146 publications that genuinely have none (letters, short case reports, technical documents) the opening paragraph of the PDF is shown under a separate heading.