An indirect heating strategy based on laser irradiation of surrounding tissues as an alternative to a direct irradiation of superficial tumors is presented in this paper. The computational analysis is based on two-dimensional axisymmetric models for both radiative transfer and transient heat transfer in a human body. Coupled transient energy equations and kinetic equations for composite human tissue take into account the metabolic heat generation and heat conduction, blood perfusion through capillaries, the volumetric heat transfer between arterial blood and ambient tissue, the thermal conversions in blood and tumor tissue, the periodic laser heating, and also heat transfer between the human body and ambient medium. An example problem for a superficial human cancer has been solved numerically to illustrate the relative role of the problem parameters on the transient temperature field and degree of thermal conversions in human tissues during hyperthermia treatment. In particular, the effect of embedded gold nanoshells which strongly absorb the laser radiation is analyzed. It is shown that required parameters of tumor hyperthermia can be also reached without gold nanoshells.
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