Bioheat Transfer Group

Our research  is in the area of heat and mass transfer applied to  medicine and biology; the technical name is “Bioheat transfer”. The objective is to understand how energy and mass is transported in tissues. The main interest of our work is to optimize medical therapies that involve tissue temperature control and consider the coupling between  temperature and the transport  of  water, oxygen and other physiological parameters. 

The medical applications of Bioheat Transfer are very interesting and go through the development of techniques to control local and global hypothermia and hyperthermia, to the optimization of surgical techniques using either lasers or cryogenic agents. In a few words, we work to control tissue temperature to either burn or freeze specific regions trying to keep the integrity of the surrounding tissue.

One of the main objectives of our research  is the determination of tissue temperature variations  produced by     inflammation, blood flow changes,  energy deposition strategies, or during cryogenic therapies. We are interested in the creation of multi-scale mathematical models to predict tissue temperature distributions by incorporating physiological and cellular parameters. These models can be applied to improve medical therapies, reduce experimentation, and serve as teaching and training models to physicians.