3-D Voxel-Based Bio-Heat Transfer Code.

摘要

The potential health effects of exposure to sources of non-ionizing radio frequency (RF) electro-magnetic energy are an area of continuing interest within the military and civilian communities. Common sources of RF exposure include cellular telephones, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, and other civilian and military communications and radar systems. One established biological effect of RF exposure is tissue heating; temperature increases of as little as 4 deg C above normal body temperature can have potentially devastating effects on living tissue. The development of an anatomically realistic thermal computer code, capable of predicting tissue temperatures, is an important accomplishment, both scientifically and for the potential economic benefit deriving from the use of the models. Previous attempts represented the human body as simple, largely homogenous, geometrical shapes that lacked required resolution. Detailed voxel-based anatomical descriptions, such as the Visible Human model, overwhelm general-purpose thermal codes. ThermoAnalytics has further developed its existing commercial thermal software to exploit the structure of these voxel-based descriptions. This prototype thermal code will not be limited to RF heating but will extend to a variety of environmental and therapeutic heating and cooling applications. The Phase I activities are reported here.