The Effects of Large Blood Vessels on Three-Dimensional Tissue Temperature Distributions During Electromagnetic Induced Nano-Hyperthermia: Numerical Simulation

As is well known, the blood flowing through large blood vessels acts as a heat sink and plays an important role in affecting temperature profiles of heated tissues [1]. In hyperthermia, heating is usually limited to the tumor and a small margin of the surrounding tissue. Since the temperatures in the rest of the body remain normal, the blood that supplies the tumor will be relatively cold. Consequently, the blood flow inside a large vessel will represent a sink which cools the nearby heated tissues and then limits heating lesion during tumor hyperthermia. Under this adverse condition, a part of vital tumor cells may remain in the thermally lethal area and lead to recurrence of tumors after hyperthermia treatment. More specifically, tumor cell survival in the vicinity of large blood vessels is often correlated with tumor recurrence after thermal therapy. Therefore, it is difficult to implement an effective hyperthermia treatment when a tumor is contiguous to a large blood vessel or such vessel transits the tumor. How to totally destroy tumor cells in the vicinity of large blood vessels has been a major challenge in hyperthermia [2].