This study aims to at numerically retrieve five constant dimensional thermo-physical properties of a biological tissue from dimensionless boundary temperature measurements.
The thermal-wave model of bio-heat transfer is used as an appropriate model because of its realism in situations in which the heat flux is extremely high or low and imposed over a short duration of time. For the numerical discretization, an unconditionally stable finite difference scheme used as a direct solver is developed. The sensitivity coefficients of the dimensionless boundary temperature measurements with respect to five constant dimensionless parameters appearing in a non-dimensionalised version of the governing hyperbolic model are computed. The retrieval of those dimensionless parameters, from both exact and noisy measurements, is successfully achieved by using a minimization procedure based on the MATLAB optimization toolbox routine lsqnonlin. The values of the five-dimensional parameters are recovered by inverting a nonlinear system of algebraic equations connecting those parameters to the dimensionless parameters whose values have already been recovered.
Accurate and stable numerical solutions for the unknown thermo-physical properties of a biological tissue from dimensionless boundary temperature measurements are obtained using the proposed numerical procedure.
The current investigation is limited to the retrieval of constant physical properties, but future work will investigate the reconstruction of the space-dependent blood perfusion coefficient.
As noise inherently present in practical measurements is inverted, the paper is of practical significance and models a real-world situation.
The findings of the present paper are of considerable significance and interest to practitioners in the biomedical engineering and medical physics sectors.
In comparison to Alkhwaji et al. (2012), the novelty and contribution of this work are as follows: considering the more general and realistic thermal-wave model of bio-heat transfer, accounting for a relaxation time; allowing for the tissue to have a finite size; and reconstructing five thermally significant dimensional parameters.
