Effect of the directional blood flow on thermal dose distribution during thermal therapy: an application of a Green's function based on the porous model.

This study presents the effects of directional blood flow and heating schemes on the distributions of temperature and thermal dose during thermal therapy. In this study, a transient bioheat transfer equation based on the porous medium property is proposed to encompass the directional effect of blood flow. A Green's function is used to obtain the temperature distribution for this modified bioheat transfer equation, and the thermal dose equivalence is used to evaluate the heating results for a set of given parameters. A 10 x 10 x 10 mm3 tumour tissue is heated by different heating schemes to investigate the thermal dose variation with the clinical therapeutic arrangement. For a rapid heating scheme, the domain of thermal lesion can effectively cover the desired therapeutic region. However, this domain of thermal lesion may extend to the downstream normal tissue if the porosity is high and the averaged blood velocity has a larger value.