Blood and heat transfer

Abstract

Circulating blood has an important role in achieving tissues thermal equilibrium. Such an action has to be taken into account when modeling treatments involving the transfer of a substantial amount of heat. Warming up or cooling down parts of the body have become important procedures in many kinds of therapies, either in a relatively mild form or by raising or lowering the temperature of targeted tissues to extreme values with the purpose of inducing massive cells destruction (ablation). Heat can be delivered in various ways (radio frequency sources, laser, focused ultrasounds), while cryoablation is performed by means of tips or balloons in which a very cold gas is circulated. In all such procedures it is very important to predict the thermal field generated in order to confine tissue damage to the targeted area. In this chapter we will examine models that have been formulated with this aim for various treatments involving heat transfer within the body. Of course we will also describe the corresponding clinical background.