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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Therm. Eng.
Sec. Heat Transfer Mechanisms and Applications
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fther.2025.1536410
This article is part of the Research Topic Bio-thermal Medical Devices, Methods, and Models: New Developments and Advances View all 3 articles

Representing unsegmented vessels using available vascular data for bioheat transfer simulation

Provisionally accepted
Rohan Amare Rohan Amare 1*Amir A. Bahadori Amir A. Bahadori 2Steven Eckels Steven Eckels 2,3
  • 1 University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, United States
  • 2 Alan Levin Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, United States
  • 3 Institute for Environmental Research, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    A primary challenge with any voxel domain generated from imaging data is associated with voxel resolution. Due to the dimensional scale of blood vessels, not all vessels are captured in a given voxel resolution, and the loss of segmentable vascular data results in discontinuous blood vessels. The pre-capillary vessels, like arterioles, provide the highest resistance to blood flow. Due to the resolution limitations, these pre-capillary vessels are modeled with the tissue as a porous domain. This results in a loss of information that could have been modeled if the pre-capillary vessels were segmented and modeled distinct from capillary bed. These vessels can only be modeled if a very high image resolution is used, increasing the computational cost of the entire simulation domain. Instead, a mathematical representation of the pressure drop induced in these unsegmented blood vessels is used. This paper focuses on developing mathematical equations to calculate the flow resistance of unsegmented vasculature with reference to flow resistance of available segmented vascular data. The effect of using mathematical equations of flow resistance on bioheat transfer is analyzed by simulating a 3D vascular domain of 32 terminal vessels and five generations of bifurcation. Each generation is successively removed and substituted with the new flow resistance equations to analyze the error in heat transfer due to a lack of segmentation data. To reduce the resultant error, two methods are proposed and demonstrated to show considerable error reduction in bioheat transfer.

    Keywords: computational biophysics, computational modeling, Bioheat equation, multiscale modeling, bioheat transfer

    Received: 28 Nov 2024; Accepted: 14 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Amare, Bahadori and Eckels. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rohan Amare, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.