Interstitial hyperthermia treatment of countercurrent vascular tissue: A comparison of Pennes, WJ and porous media bioheat models

• This paper compares the three Pennes, WJ and porous media bioheat models with them.
• In other few similar articles the porous media or WJ models are compared with Pennes model in 1D coordinate.
• In this paper the two WJ and poros media models also compared with each other.
• This study is done under normal and hyperthermic conditions with 2D temperature distribution.

Development of appropriate heat transfer models to investigate the thermal behavior of living tissues has become increasingly important in simulations of cancer hyperthermia. In this paper, a review is initially presented of the more important general models developed for heat transfer description of perfused tissues. Comparisons are then made between Pennes' simplified Weinbaum and Jiji “WJ” and the more recent porous media “PM” bioheat models. For this purpose, a mathematical model is developed for the heat transfer in a cylindrical medium containing parallel counter-current pairs of small vessels with characteristics as much as possible similar to those of living tissues. The validity of the models is examined and confirmed using the Pennes in vivo experiments and one-dimensional analytical solutions. For consideration of interstitial hyperthermia treatment the smaller cylindrical zone with typical heat generation, is assumed in the center of the main cylinder. The numerical simulation results revealed that, despite difference in temperature distributions calculated by these three models at normal condition, the heat affected zone at hyperthermic condition predicted by all three models are similar.