ABSTRACT
Computerized simulations of various treatment methods are beginning to demonstrate their true potential in clinical situations. This is occurring in all of the traditional healthcare and treatment modalities. The mathematical models are known to be generally useful in invoking mathematical rigor and precision in the formulation and evaluation of problems. Numerical simulations provide a theoretical framework that can be used to substantiate, evaluate, and interpret experimental results. In this chapter, a detailed study on numerical simulations of the different procedures in the field of ‘thermal medicine’ is analyzed and compared.
Thermal medicine is the method of application or alteration of human body temperature in order to cure certain ailments or to condition the body for other treatments. The different treatment methods in thermal medicine include; hyperthermia, thermal ablation, cryosurgery, and heat-activated drug delivery. All of these methods are actively applied in cancer treatment. Even though these methods have been in use for decades, the scope of optimization of these methods utilizing computer-aided designing/ computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAE) tools are now being explored by various researchers. Such research has already begun to show their 154importance in the prediction of the outcome of experiments or treatments (in terms of temperature distributions for the applications).
Heat transfer is a major area of study under mechanical engineering and also the one with the widest range of tools and techniques for the purpose of analysis as well as experimentation. The mathematical models of thermal medicine are founded on bio-heat transfer models, which can exploit most of the existing techniques in heat transfer for computerized simulations.
This work aims at verifying the reliability of the application of various bioheat equations for the analysis of heat transfer problems occurring in the biological tissues during cancer treatment methods. Direct experiments in humans are against our ethical concerns, so in such a condition, the numerical analysis of treatment procedures can be a promising technique to find out the apt and effective treatment for a specific type of cancer.
