Blood vessel architectural features and their effects on thermal phenomena

Abstract

Blood vessels are anatomically and mechanically complex tissue structures. The particular architecture of arteries, veins and capillaries affects their response in therapeutic heating applications. This work summarizes the signal anatomic features of blood vessels for engineers and scientists, introduces the primary underlying physical principles which describe their function and response to external heating for clinicians, and provides a few representative examples of heating applications. It is by no means complete — such a work would be at least two orders of magnitude longer — but, we hope, provides an adequate survey of the pertinent literature so that the interested can locate more substantial treatments of the subject.