Continuum Models for the Cooling Effect of Blood Flow on Thermal Ablation Techniques

We examine the important role played by perfusion-mediated tissue cooling due to large vessels during the radio-frequency ablation procedures performed in biomedical sciences. The existence of blood flow near heated tissue carries away the heat from the ablation zone. This undesired thermal dissipation, known as the cooling effect, affects the final volume of the necrosis zone, and it is responsible for a large number of local recurrences. In this work, different continuum models are considered to describe the heat transfer and the blood circulation behavior dependence on several physiological parameters: the velocity of the blood, its viscosity, temperatures of the blood and the contact tissue, the diameter of the cross-sectional area, and the area of the heated region. The correspondent closed-form expressions are provided and discussed.