Modeling and simulation of bioheat transfer in the human eye using the 3D alpha finite element method (αFEM)

Abstract

Computational modeling is an effective tool for the detection of eye abnormalities and a valuable assistant to hyperthermia treatments. In all these diagnoses and treatments, predicting the temperature distribution accurately is very important. However, the standard finite element method (FEM) currently used for such purposes has strong reliance on element meshes and the discretized system exhibits the so-called 'overly stiff' behavior. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper formulates an alpha finite element method (αFEM) to compute two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) bioheat transfer in the human eyes. The αFEM can produce much more accurate results using triangular (2D) and tetrahedron (3D) elements that can be generated automatically for complicated domains and hence is particularly suited for modeling human eyes. In the αFEM, a scaling factor α∈[0,1] is introduced to combine the 'overly stiff' FEM model and 'overly soft' node-based finite element method (NS-FEM) model. With a properly chosen α, the αFEM can produce models with very 'close-to-exact' stiffness of the continuous system. Numerical results have shown that the present method gives much more accurate results compared with the standard FEM and the NS-FEM. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.