In the eternal quest for ever more effective and less expensive treatments, cryosurgery shows a great potential but the prediction of thermal damages on tissues remains a crucial problem. During this project, we propose to integrate models of heat transfer around a cryoprobe to a simulation tool which will assist the surgeon in his task of operation planning.
Virtual reality revolutionizes the area of biomedicine.
This minimally invasive surgery consists in destroying ill cells such as those of malign tumors using one or several probes cooled down to cryogenic temperatures. This master's thesis will focus on the simulation of these surgical interventions in order to provide the surgeons with a suitable planning tool. Thus, in the inner structure of the generic simulator, the cryoprobes will perform as actors interacting upon each other and with their environment according to some heat transfer models governed by the physical properties of biological tissues. As for the virtual reality support, the 3DFusion project will provide it. The current work aims to simulate faithfully and in real time the heat transmission around universally characterized cryoprobes.