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

Real-time analysis of bio-heat transfer is very beneficial in improving clinical outcomes of hyperthermia and thermal ablative treatments but challenging to achieve due to large computational costs. This paper presents a fast numerical algorithm well suited for real-time solutions of bio-heat transfer, and it achieves real-time computation via the (i) computationally efficient explicit dynamics in the temporal domain, (ii) element-level thermal load computation, (iii) computationally efficient finite elements, (iv) explicit formulation for unknown nodal temperature, and (v) pre-computation of constant simulation matrices and parameters, all of which lead to a significant reduction in computation time for fast run-time computation. The proposed methodology considers temperature-dependent thermal properties for nonlinear characteristics of bio-heat transfer in soft tissue. Utilizing a parallel execution, the proposed method achieves computation time reduction of 107.71 and 274.57 times compared to those of with and without parallelization of the commercial finite element codes if temperature-dependent thermal properties are considered, and 303.07 and 772.58 times if temperature-independent thermal properties are considered, far exceeding the computational performance of the commercial finite element codes, presenting great potential in real-time predictive analysis of tissue temperature for planning, optimization and evaluation of thermo-therapeutic treatments.