Efficient Solver for a Simplified Model of the Multi-Physics Heat Transfer Problem in Radio Frequency Ablation of Hepatic Tumors

Mathematical modeling and computer simulation of heat transfer in the liver play a key role in prediction of radio frequency ablation outcome. While multi-physics modeling should be used for accurate simulation of heat transfer in a highly perfused organ like the liver, the computational cost of such a problem could have a negative impact on the simulation time. This article extends a highly parallel finite element-based method to simulate the multi-physics heat transfer problem in the liver efficiently. A message passing interface (MPI)-based strong coupling method is developed and tested on cluster nodes. The scalability of this work is assessed by performing simulations on up to 1024 cores.