A novel 3D modelling and simulation technique in thermotherapy predictive analysis on biological tissue

Abstract

Optical techniques applied to biological tissue allow the development of new tools in medical praxis, either in tissue characterization or treatment. Examples of the latter are Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) or Low Intensity Laser Treatment (LILT), and also a promising technique called thermotherapy, that tries to control temperature increase in a pathological tissue in order to reduce or even eliminate pathological effects. The application of thermotherapy requires a previous analysis in order to avoid collateral damage to the patient, and also to choose the appropriate optical source parameters. Among different implementations of opto-thermal models, the one we use consists of a three dimensional Beer-Lambert law for the optical part, and a bio-heat equation, that models heat transference, conduction, convection, radiation, blood perfusion and vaporization, solved via a numerical spatial-temporal explicit finite difference approach, for the thermal part. The usual drawback of the numerical method of the thermal model is that convergence constraints make spatial and temporal steps very small, with the natural consequence of slow processing. In this work, a new algorithm implementation is used for the bio-heat equation solution, in such a way that the simulation time decreases considerably. Thermal damage based on the Arrhenius integral damage is also considered.