Non-Fourier based thermal-mechanical tissue damage prediction for thermal ablation.

Prediction of tissue damage under thermal loads plays important role for thermal ablation planning. A new methodology is presented in this paper by combing non-Fourier bio-heat transfer, constitutive elastic mechanics as well as non-rigid motion of dynamics to predict and analyze thermal distribution, thermal-induced mechanical deformation and thermal-mechanical damage of soft tissues under thermal loads. Simulations and comparison analysis demonstrate that the proposed methodology based on the non-Fourier bio-heat transfer can account for the thermal-induced mechanical behaviors of soft tissues and predict tissue thermal damage more accurately than classical Fourier bio-heat transfer based model.