The Effect of Various Types of Constant and Time Dependent Heating on Human Tissue: A Finite Element Approach

Abstract

Cancer is one of the most leading causes of death now worldwide. Most of the cancer therapy aims to raise the temperature of the cancerous tissue above a therapeutic value and thermally kill or destroy it. Minimizing the damage of the healthy cells surrounding the infected cells is one of the major concerns of these therapies. Precise acknowledgment of the temperature profile of living tissue during therapy is of utmost necessity for this purpose. Towards that direction, this paper presents an unsteady finite element model of the bioheat equation to analyze the temperature distribution during the thermal therapy. A C language based system has been developed to solve the unsteady part of the problem employing Crank-Nicolson method and to solve the linear problem employing the Gauss elimination technique. Using this system, we investigate thermal behaviors in human tissues subjected to constant, sinusoidal spatial and surface, point, and stochastic heating. It was found that surface heating is beneficial for treating skin surface cells, while laser heating for the cells that lie below the skin surface. Moreover, for deep cell, the point heating style can bring the most desirable outcome. Results describe in this paper could be useful for researchers and doctors to optimize the treatment procedure, even protocols.