Comprehensive evaluation on the heating capacities of four typical whole body hyperthermia strategies via compartmental model

The whole body hyperthermia (WBH) is being regarded as a very promising way of efficiently treating patients with tumors already distributed throughout the human body. However, quite a few important issues still remain unclear, some of which are how much energy can be deposited into human body or how long will it take for a patient’s body core temperature to rise from its normal to the desired point. Aiming to provide a general background for tackling the complex heat transfer behavior throughout the whole human body during a WBH treatment, we propose in this paper to adopt a compartmental model for a comprehensive evaluation of several existing typical WBH methods. The heating performance of four heating strategies such as contact-heating-based WBH (CWBH), radiative- heating-based WBH (RWBH), extracorporeal circulative-heating-enabled WBH (EWBH) as well as interventional WBH (IWBH) were compared and evaluated. The characteristics of different WBH methods were assessed in detail from the engineering perspective. Further, the effect of the thermal regulation mechanism and brain cooling upon body temperature response during WBH was investigated. Specially, this research explained for the first time the reason why intravascular heating strategies could have a higher heating efficiency in raising body core temperature than that of the heating from outside. This study would help probe into the complex behavior of the temperature response of the human body subject to various WBH. The theoretical model and calculation method could serve as a valuable guidance for future tumor treatment planning.