Reconstruction of the thermal properties in a wave-type model of bio-heat transfer
International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow
ISSN: 0961-5539
Article publication date: 29 April 2020
Issue publication date: 16 November 2020
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to at numerically retrieve five constant dimensional thermo-physical properties of a biological tissue from dimensionless boundary temperature measurements.
Design/methodology/approach
The thermal-wave model of bio-heat transfer is used as an appropriate model because of its realism in situations in which the heat flux is extremely high or low and imposed over a short duration of time. For the numerical discretization, an unconditionally stable finite difference scheme used as a direct solver is developed. The sensitivity coefficients of the dimensionless boundary temperature measurements with respect to five constant dimensionless parameters appearing in a non-dimensionalised version of the governing hyperbolic model are computed. The retrieval of those dimensionless parameters, from both exact and noisy measurements, is successfully achieved by using a minimization procedure based on the MATLAB optimization toolbox routine lsqnonlin. The values of the five-dimensional parameters are recovered by inverting a nonlinear system of algebraic equations connecting those parameters to the dimensionless parameters whose values have already been recovered.
Findings
Accurate and stable numerical solutions for the unknown thermo-physical properties of a biological tissue from dimensionless boundary temperature measurements are obtained using the proposed numerical procedure.
Research limitations/implications
The current investigation is limited to the retrieval of constant physical properties, but future work will investigate the reconstruction of the space-dependent blood perfusion coefficient.
Practical implications
As noise inherently present in practical measurements is inverted, the paper is of practical significance and models a real-world situation.
Social implications
The findings of the present paper are of considerable significance and interest to practitioners in the biomedical engineering and medical physics sectors.
Originality/value
In comparison to Alkhwaji et al. (2012), the novelty and contribution of this work are as follows: considering the more general and realistic thermal-wave model of bio-heat transfer, accounting for a relaxation time; allowing for the tissue to have a finite size; and reconstructing five thermally significant dimensional parameters.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
M. Alosaimi would like to thank Taif University in Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau (UKSACB) in London for supporting his PhD studies at the University of Leeds.
Citation
Alosaimi, M., Lesnic, D. and Niesen, J. (2020), "Reconstruction of the thermal properties in a wave-type model of bio-heat transfer", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 30 No. 12, pp. 5143-5167. https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-10-2019-0776
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited