Tetrahedral node for Transmission-Line Modeling (TLM) applied to Bio-heat Transfer.
Transmission-Line Modeling (TLM) is a numerical method used to solve complex and time-domain bio-heat transfer problems. In TLM, parallelepipeds are used to discretize three-dimensional problems. The drawback in using parallelepiped shapes is that instead of refining only the domain of interest, a large additional domain would also have to be refined, which results in increased computational time and memory space. In this paper, we developed a tetrahedral node for TLM applied to bio-heat transfer that does not have the drawback associated with the parallelepiped node. The model includes heat source, blood perfusion, boundary conditions and initial conditions. The boundary conditions could be adiabatic, temperature, heat flux, or convection. The predicted temperature and heat flux were compared against results from an analytical solution and the results agreed within 2% for a mesh size of 69,941 nodes and a time step of 5ms. The method was further validated against published results of maximum skin-surface temperature difference in a breast with and without tumor and the results agreed within 6%. The published results were obtained from a model that used parallelepiped TLM node. An open source software, TLMBHT, was written using the theory developed herein and is available for download free-of-charge.
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, 111 Wing Dr, Riley-Robb Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Electronic address: hm496@cornell.edu.
Hugo F M
HFM
Milan
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, 111 Wing Dr, Riley-Robb Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
Kifle G
KG
Gebremedhin
D000465:Algorithms; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000503:physiopathology; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005260:Female; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software; D050151:Subcutaneous Fat / Q000503:physiopathology
Bio-heat Equation; Numerical method; Pennes' equation; Tetrahedral node; Transmission-line modeling; Unstructured mesh