3-D Voxel-Based Bio-Heat Transfer Code

The potential health effects of exposure to sources of non-ionizing radio frequency (RF) electro-magnetic energy are an area of continuing interest within the military and civilian communities. Common sources of RF exposure include cellular telephones,magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, and other civilian and military communications and radar systems. The development of an anatomically realistic thermal computer code, capable of predicting tissue temperatures, is an important accomplishment, bothscientifically and for the potential economic benefit deriving from the use of the models. ThermoAnalytics has further developed its existing commercial thermal software to exploit the structure of voxel-based descriptions. In Phase II, we propose tooptimize and enhance the Phase I 3-D heat transfer code to make it more compact, faster, and able to solve sophisticated problems. The Phase II code will have enhanced user input and output features as well as a graphical user interface. At the end ofPhase II, we will have developed a bio-heat transfer code that incorporates: 1) Physiological heat sources and thermoregulatory mechanisms (metabolic heating, sweating/evaporative cooling, respiratory cooling, and blood flow withvasoconstriction/vasodilatation); 2) passive and active clothing models; 3) environmental loads (solar heating, radiation exchange, wind convection); and human comfort model.