Penne's Bio-heat model... not sufficient, or is it...

One method of treating tumors is by use of hyperthermia. In order to implement this treatment a sufficient understanding of the attendant thermal processes in diseased and normal tissue must be attained. It is vital to be able to predict, measure, and interpret the tissues thermal and vascular response to heating appropriately if one is going to use such a treatment. The problem lay herein, living tissue morphology is of a complex nature, and thus modeling of its properties can be quite difficult. In studies past, researchers have used some simplifying assumptions that would presume to be needed. However, there have been investigators recently who have argued that “Penne’s interpretation of the vascular contribution to heat transfer in prefused tissues fails to account for the actual thermal equilibration process between the flowing blood and the surrounding tissue and proposed new models, presumably based on a more realistic anatomy of the perfused tissue” (Holmes,K.R, Arkin, H. Xu, L.X.).
This article gives an analytic comparison of several new bio-heat transfer models and places specific focus on the problems “of their experimental validation.” Since there is very little measuring equipment able to map out the tissues properties with all its variations at the spatial scale of blood vessels (i.e. diameters of less than .2 mm), the new models lack experimental support and thus are subject to error. All and all, the best way to map this bio-heat transfer, specifically in the case of hyperthermia, could be Pennes model, “providing its use is based on some insights gained from the studies described here.”
I personally found this article interesting because we talked about this in bio-mechanics. Not necessarily for hyperthermia in tumors but for modeling the vasculatures bio-heat transfer with Penne’s model. We have talked a lot about how many people misuse these models and as engineers we are to be very careful. Well this article showed how even Penne’s model can be misused. Very interesting stuff!
--Andrew Stewart
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