Effect of Physiological Parameters on the Temperature Distribution of a Layered Head Model

Abstract

Brain temperature control is important in clinical therapy, because moderate temperature reduction of brain temperature increases the survival rate after head trauma. A factor that affects the brain temperature distribution is the cerebral blood flow, which is controlled by autoregulatory mechanisms. To improve the existing thermal models of brain, we incorporate the effect of the temperature over the metabolic heat generation, and the regulatory processes that control the cerebral blood perfusion and depend on physiological parameters like, the mean arterial blood pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide, and the cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption. The introduction of these parameters in a thermal model gives information about how specific conditions, such as brain edema, hypoxia, hypercapnia, or hypotension, affect the temperature distribution within the brain. Existing biological thermal models of the human brain, assume constant blood perfusion, and neglect metabolic heat generation or consider it constant, which is a valid assumption for healthy tissue. But during sickness, trauma or under the effect of drugs like anesthetics, the metabolic activity and organ blood flow vary considerably, and such variations must be accounted for in order to achieve accurate thermal modeling. Our work, on a layered head model, shows that variations of the physiological parameters have profound effect on the temperature gradients within the head.