BIOHEAT EQUATION

BIOHEAT TRANSFER
Bioheat transfer is the study of heat transfer in
biological systems. In simpler terms, it is the study
of how heat moves from one compartment, be it
within the body or external to the body, to another
compartment in the body. Bioheat transfer has its
foundations in the engineering discipline of heat
transfer and is itself a subfield of
biomedical engineering or bioengineering. In
addition, computational techniques to model various
bioheat transfer scenarios are widely employed and
hold an important place in developing devices and
protocols for the medical community.

CONSTITUTIVE VALUES
Because modeling bioheat transfer is of the utmost importance in proper
device or heating protocol design, constitutive values of various tissues of the
body had to be measured early on in the history of bioheat transfer.
Of particular importance were the values of specific gravity, specific heat,
thermal conductivity for the various tissues in the body e.g. skin, fat, muscle,
bone, and blood. Today, such values can be easily found in various handbooks
and study publications such as the CRC Handbook of Mechanical Engineering
(2nd Ed.) or the Report of the task group on reference man (1975).
To illustrate the detailed knowledge that is required by the bioheat transfer
community, The CRC Handbook of Mechanical Engineering includes a nearly 2
page table of value for thermal conductivity of various organs including but
not limited to: kidney, aorta, arterial plaque, blood, liver, spleen, heart,
muscle and tumor.
Because of the importance of blood perfusion on thermal equilibria in the
body, blood perfusion values were also pursued early in the history of the
field. The CRC Handbook of Mechanical Engineering's chapter on Bioheat
Transfer

THE CARDIOVASCULAR
SYSTEM
The cardiovascular system is the key system by which heat is
distributed throughout the body. The blood serves as the
vehicle to transport heat from the areas of high heat to areas
of lower heat. In general this transfer takes place in the
direction from body core to extremities such as the limbs and
head. In the case where the extremities are hotter than the
core body temperature, perfusion would serve to transport
heat from the extremity back towards the body core. Whether
or not the core temperature rises depends on many factors
such as the duration of elevated local temperature at the
extremity, temperature difference between extremity and core,
volume of blood heated above core temperature, and the rate
of blood perfusion. This same moderating phenomena of blood
perfusion can be applied to local heat transfer problems e.g.
heating of a tumor.

BIOHEAT MODELS
Here we present a simplified model of the bioheat equation for steady-state, one-dimensional heat
transfer. From a one-dimensional energy balance in the x-direction:
\frac{d^2 T}{dx^2} + \frac{\dot{q}_m + \dot{q}_p}{k}=0 \quad [1] [2]
Where \dot{q}_m is the metabolic heat source term and \dot{q}_p is the perfusion heat source term,
both per unit volume. The thermal conductivity, k, is a constant.
Pennes proposed an expression for the perfusion term by assuming that the temperatures of blood
entering and exiting capillaries are both constant for any small volume of tissue. We can say that the
temperatures of the blood at each state are the same as that of the surroundings, namely the arterial
temperature and the local tissue temperature. Now we must define the perfusion rate, \omega. This is
the ratio of the volumetric flow rate of blood per volume of tissue. Thus we have for the perfusion term:
\dot{q}_p=\omega \rho_b c_b (T_a-T) \quad [2] [2]
Where \rho_b and c_b are the density and specific heat capacity of the blood, respectively.
Combining these two equations results in:
\frac{d^2 T}{dx^2} + \frac{\dot{q}_m + \omega \rho_b c_b (T_a-T)}{k}=0 \quad [3] [2]