Ice Formation in Biological Medium

The target of the action of low temperatures is the water contained in large amounts in the biological objects, thus the phase transitions of water are of primary importance. A typical cryosurgery operation lasts between several minutes and an hour [838]. Cryoaction in medicine consists of a single or several (in cryosurgery) cycles “freezing—exposition—thawing” [346, 474, 745, 782,838]. The interval between the cycles in cryosurgery considerably increases the destruction of the living tissues, leaving the tissue for a longer time in the hypotonic state and providing the sufficient time needed for the blood microcirculation failure to develop [78,190].

Cryoaction could be modulated in time (the so-called “dynamic” cryo-surgery [822] or cryocycling [791]); as experiments show, the frequency of the temperature oscillations, caused by cryoprobe, is conserved throughout the entire region, while its amplitude decays with distance [791].