Analytical solution of one-dimensional Pennes' bioheat equation

Abstract

Pennes' bioheat equation is the most widely used thermal model for studying heat transfer in biological systems exposed to radiofrequency energy. In their article, "Effect of Surface Cooling and Blood Flow on the Microwave Heating of Tissue,"Foster et al. published an analytical solution to the one-dimensional (1-D) problem, obtained using the Fourier transform. However, their article did not offer any details of the derivation. In this work, we revisit the 1-D problem and provide a comprehensive mathematical derivation of an analytical solution. Our result corrects an error in Foster's solution which might be a typo in their article. Unlike Foster et al., we integrate the partial differential equation directly. The expression of solution has several apparent singularities for certain parameter values where the physical problem is not expected to be singular. We show that all these singularities are removable, and we derive alternative non-singular formulas. Finally, we extend our analysis to write out an analytical solution of the 1-D bioheat equation for the case of multiple electromagnetic heating pulses.