Predicting the Effects of Blood Flow Rate and Size of Vessels in a Vasculature on Hyperthermia Treatments

Hyperthermic treatments are a new frontier in the fight against cancer. The treatment involves raising temperatures of a specific tumorous site over a period of 45-60 minutes to help destroy cancerous cells or increase the effectiveness of radioactive treatment in the area. The promising treatment works through increasing blood flow in the area, making the tumor cells more susceptible to treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

The article posted takes a look at a controversial equation that's been used for over half a century termed Pennes Bio Heat Transfer Equation (PBHTE) to measure the temperature distribution of tissue. This equation has been used widely during hyperthermia treatment to ensure proper temperature levels, however the equation does not take into account the thermal distribution of blood vessels. The article attempts to take a step towards correcting this flaw through 3-D computer modeling, and through the combination of the conduction equation of tissue and the convective energy equation. The method developed was termed the countercurrent blood vessel network (CBVN) model.

The results show that the size of local blood vessels does not have a significant effect on the local temperature. During hyperthermia therapy, the vessel size has no impact on the power consumption if blood flow rate is constant. However, in thermally significant blood vessels, the power is used to heat the blood vessels, leading to higher temperatures in the blood vessels when using PBHTE as a model.

This article interested me because of a couple reasons. First, I had never heard of hyperthermic cancer treatments until this article. At first read, it seemed like this therapy could fall under the category of alternative medicine, but after reading more about it, the treatment seemed more and more viable and effective. Second, this article was different from other articles I have recently read because of its close work with numbers and computers, as opposed to petri dishes and scaffolds. Implications that one article type is better than the other are moot, however the argument that this article does a good job showing the intertwining of both engineering and biology stands strong.