Abstract This article presents a new Boundary Element Method (BEM) formulation to simulate coupled bioheat transfer in heterogeneous biological tissues subjected to external electromagnetic (EM) heating with emphasis on cancer hyperthermia therapy. The biological domain consists of spatially distributed thermal and electrical properties describing various healthy and malignant tissue zones. The electric potential is computed by solving Laplace's equation and the resulting volumetric heating added to the Pennes bioheat equation as an internal heat source. The BEM formulation eliminates full volumetric meshing requirements, enabling effective and accurate description of steep temperature gradients occurring in tissue interfaces. Ideal contact conditions are enforced at tumor–healthy tissue interfaces, and convective heat loss along external tissue surfaces. Numerical simulations investigate the influence of applied voltage, tumor conductivity, and electrode position on internal temperature profiles. The calculations demonstrate that high tumor conductivity drastically increases the local heating and that correct electrode positioning significantly enhances thermal concentration within the tumor region. BEM solutions are compared with analytical and Finite Element Method (FEM) solutions and are shown to possess excellent convergence and enhanced interface resolution. This approach provides an efficient computational tool for optimizing EM-based hyperthermia protocols in cancer therapy, with satisfactory accuracy in temperature sensitivity estimation and spatial energy deposition in layered tissues.
Fahmy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.