ABSTRACT
There has been considerable interest in developing sound and accurate thermal models that describe heat transfer within a living tissue with blood perfusion. Since the landmark paper by Pennes (1948), a number of bioheat transfer equations for living tissue have been proposed to remedy possible shortcomings in his equation. Although Pennes’ model is often adequate for roughly describing the effect of blood flow on the tissue temperature, there exist some serious shortcomings in his model due to its inherent simplicity, as pointed out by Wulff (1974), namely, assuming uniform perfusion rate without accounting for blood flow direction, neglecting the important anatomical features of the circulatory network system such as countercurrent arrangement of the system, and choosing only the venous blood stream as the fluid stream equilibrated with the tissue.
