Heat transfer in perfused biological tissue—II. The “macroscopic” temperature distribution in tissue

Abstract

In Part I, the general solution of the heat transport equation was given for a medium of constant thermal properties, containing a general convection fieldv(r,t). Starting from this general solution, an average or “macroscopic” temperature distribution is calculated in this paper, since in most physiological problems only an average or “macroscopic” temperature is accessible to the measurement. It is shown that the averaged temperature distribution is influenced alone by the order of the local symmetries of the convection field. These local symmetries can be deduced from anatomical data on the vascular architecture. In order to perform the averaging process, a detailed discussion, and an estimate of the correlation between the microscopic temperature variation and the convection field is carried out. Hereby, great emphasis is put on the experimental consequences of these results. As an illustrative example, the calculation of the macroscopic temperature distribution in a medium traversed by parallel capillaries is outlined.