Real-time computation of bio-heat transfer in the fast explicit dynamics finite element algorithm (FED-FEM) framework

Abstract

Real-time analysis of bio-heat transfer is very beneficial in improving\nclinical outcomes of hyperthermia and thermal ablative treatments but\nchallenging to achieve due to large computational costs. This paper presents a\nfast numerical algorithm well suited for real-time solutions of bio-heat\ntransfer, and it achieves real-time computation via the (i) computationally\nefficient explicit dynamics in the temporal domain, (ii) element-level thermal\nload computation, (iii) computationally efficient finite elements, (iv)\nexplicit formulation for unknown nodal temperature, and (v) pre-computation of\nconstant simulation matrices and parameters, all of which lead to a significant\nreduction in computation time for fast run-time computation. The proposed\nmethodology considers temperature-dependent thermal properties for nonlinear\ncharacteristics of bio-heat transfer in soft tissue. Utilising a parallel\nexecution, the proposed method achieves computation time reduction of 107.71\nand 274.57 times compared to those of with and without parallelisation of the\ncommercial finite element codes if temperature-dependent thermal properties are\nconsidered, and 303.07 and 772.58 times if temperature-independent thermal\nproperties are considered, far exceeding the computational performance of the\ncommercial finite element codes, presenting great potential in real-time\npredictive analysis of tissue temperature for planning, optimisation and\nevaluation of thermo-therapeutic treatments. The source code is available at\nhttps://github.com/jinaojakezhang/FEDFEMBioheat.\n