Modeling skin thermal pain sensation: Role of non-Fourier thermal behavior in transduction process of nociceptor

Abstract

Skin thermal pain is one of the most common phenomena in human daily life (e.g. contact with hot substances) and in clinical thermal therapies (e.g. laser assisted diseased skin ablation), where the thermal behavior in skin tissue is the critical process. However, the underlying physical and neural mechanisms of skin thermal pain are not clearly understood, and there are few attempts to model it. Besides, due to the “lengthy” thermal relaxation time in biological tissue, non-Fourier thermal behavior has been experimentally observed, attracting increasingly attention to this phenomenon. In this paper, a new thermal-neural model was developed in order to investigate the possible role of non-Fourier thermal behavior in the transduction process of skin thermal pain sensation. In the model, the non-Fourier thermal behavior of skin tissue was coupled to the neural response of the nociceptor (special receptor for pain sensation). The results demonstrated that the predicted thermal-neural responses of nociceptors from different bioheat transfer models can deviate substantially under constant surface temperature heating, implying that the non-Fourier thermal feature may play an important role in the nociceptor transduction process of skin thermal pain.