Multiphysics Modeling Software for Directed Energy Bio-effects

Directed energy sources such as lasers have many critical effects on biological tissue that make understanding their usage on and around people an important area of study. Upon deposition of the energy, lasers can interact with biological tissues in many ways, and the interactions generally involve physical mechanisms that can be based on photochemical, photothermal, or photomechanical effects. All three of these mechanisms involve some similar basic physical phenomena, including light transport in turbid media, thermal heat transport, mass transport, material changes such as thermal coagulation and photochemistry, wave propagation, plasma formation, and hydrodynamic motion. While several comprehensive multiphysics codes exist, they are not developed primarily for biological systems and are also difficult to extend because many of them are not open source. To address this shortcoming, ATA Engineering, Inc., proposes an innovative approach for the development of a generalized concept design of a versatile multiphysics predictive tool for the simulation of biological effects of lasers on tissue by leveraging (1) a variety of well-tested and validated open-source individual physics tools and (2) an open-source framework that can integrate those tools. The concept design will be prototyped and demonstrated to assess feasibility of the approach.