Novel conformal technique to reduce staircasing artifacts at material boundaries for FDTD modeling of the bioheat equation

Phys Med Biol. 2007 Aug 7;52(15):4371-81. doi: 10.1088/0031-9155/52/15/001. Epub 2007 Jun 22.

Abstract

The modeling of thermal effects, often based on the Pennes Bioheat Equation, is becoming increasingly popular. The FDTD technique commonly used in this context suffers considerably from staircasing errors at boundaries. A new conformal technique is proposed that can easily be integrated into existing implementations without requiring a special update scheme. It scales fluxes at interfaces with factors derived from the local surface normal. The new scheme is validated using an analytical solution, and an error analysis is performed to understand its behavior. The new scheme behaves considerably better than the standard scheme. Furthermore, in contrast to the standard scheme, it is possible to obtain with it more accurate solutions by increasing the grid resolution.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Artifacts*
  • Body Temperature / physiology*
  • Body Temperature Regulation / physiology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Energy Transfer / physiology*
  • Finite Element Analysis
  • Hot Temperature*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Thermography / methods*