The future of biothermal engineering

This is a report on a three-day workshop held at the Allerton House of the University of Illinois. The first day consisted of invited tutorials on topics related to biothermal engineering: biological structures, analysis of microvascular heat transfer, temperature measurement, cryobiology and cryosurgery, burns, and industrial and consumer applications. The rest of the workshop consisted of discussions in small groups and in plenary sessions dealing with relevant topics. Although the discussions endeavored to be as comprehensive as possible, the specific topics were selected by the participants based on their expertise and interests. The main areas examined were: Instrumentation, Priority applications, Mathematical modeling, Thermal injury. The reliable measurement of the temperature distribution inside the living tissue is still the premier problem of instrumentation although the measurement of other parameters, such as properties, blood perfusion or heat flux, is also of great importance. The most important applications are medical, industrial, consumer, agricultural, space, and military. The degree of sophistication needed in the analysis of specific problems varies a great deal from relatively simple heat conduction models to complicated ones including blood perfusion, anisotropy, and the influence of large blood vessels. For many applications new experimental data are still needed. There have been significant advances in the modeling of living tissue with increasing understanding of its thermal behavior. The consensus was, however, that the models will always have to be tissue or organ specific and some new models are still to be developed.