title: Biomedical simulation of heat transfer in a human heart.
abstract: Theory and practical experiences from numerical simulations of heat transfer in the field of medicine are presented in this paper. The cooling of a human heart during surgery was taken as an illustrative example. All phases of the simulation process are described starting with the construction of an irregularly shaped 3-dimensional model. The mathematical model is based on diffusion and Navier-Stokes equations. The system of partial differential equations is solved by finite difference approximation using an explicit time-stepping scheme to obtain the time evolution of the solution for the complete simulated interval, which is typically 1 h. A typical domain is composed of several million voxels; therefore, the program was parallelized to speed up the simulation. A speed-up of 8.2 was obtained on 16 processors in a Linux cluster.
authors.affiliation: JoZef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. marjan.sterk@ijs.si
authors.forename: Marjan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sterk
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Trobec
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001831:Body Temperature / Q000502:physiology; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003331:Coronary Vessels / Q000502:physiology; D006321:Heart / Q000502:physiology*; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011312:Pressure; D013816:Thermodynamics