Three-dimensional thermal assessment in cancerous tumors based on local thermal non-equilibrium approach for hyperthermia treatment

Abstract

An appropriate evaluation of thermal characteristics in biological bodies under the influence of external heat source during the hyperthermia therapy is inherently difficult, since living tissues have a non-uniform and non-homogeneous structure composed of solid-liquid interfaces. In general, biological bodies are very sensitive to temperature alteration as it leads to a drastic change of protein structures, which in turn causes a permanent thermal injury. Therefore, it can always be desirable to use a suitable model for determining the temperature response in therapeutic domains accurately. Recently, the local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) model develops based on the energy exchange in the vascular geometry confined with arteriol-venule systems. The present study establishes a hybrid analytical scheme by applying the LTNE bioheat approach for the three-dimensional (3-D) temperature response in a cancer domain under the hyperthermia treatment. To take care of non-uniformity and porous media approaches of living tissues, this study suggests a pertinent spatially dependent initial condition along with the appropriate boundary conditions in the physical domain for the accurate temperature prediction. A comparative study of temperature distribution between LTNE and local thermal equilibrium (LTE) models has been performed which justifies the necessity to include the porous media approach in the analysis. In order to understand a 3-D heat flow in the hyperthermia domain, thermal contours may give such information and thus 3-D heat transfer analysis with two different time lags always predicts the exact thermo-biological behaviour as a function of the therapeutic exposure time. Finally, the research output validated with the available experimental hyperthermia therapeutic data and the present 3-D thermal response is in good agreement with the existing experimental values, which indicates the present model is appropriate to determine the thermal behaviour of living tissues accurately.