Investigation on the effect of protective brain cooling to the temperature increasing behavior during whole body hyperthermia

Abstract

The whole body hyperthermia (WBH) has been identified as one of the most promising therapies to treat patients with tumors already spread throughout the human body. However, this treatment may cause several side effects including infection, bleeding, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea etc. More seriously, long period of whole body hyperthermia would cause thermal damage to some major organs, especially for human brain. Therefore, understanding the thermal behavior of human brain and other body parts during whole body hyperthermia and implementation of appropriate strategies of brain cooling are very important. This paper is dedicated to present a comprehensive investigation on the bio-heat transfer problem throughout the whole human body subjected to several typical whole body hyperthermia methods via compartment model of human. Especially, the effect of protective brain cooling to the temperature increasing behavior during whole body hyperthermia will be of major concern. In addition, the influence of several brain cooling strategies such as convective and intravascular cooling method, were compared and evaluated. According to the simulation, during whole body hyperthermia, the heating rate in human head is significantly higher than that in other organs. Furthermore, the intravascular cooling method is more effective than convective one, which also plays a pivotal role to reduce performance of whole body hyperthermia. By contrast the convective brain cooling method produces obvious protective effect mainly on shallow but less effect on deep domains of human brain. These results could help optimize treatment strategies of whole body hyperthermia and protective brain cooling in future clinics.