GPU-accelerated finite element modeling of bio-heat conduction for simulation of thermal ablation

Efficient simulation of heating processes in thermal ablation is of great importance for surgical simulation of thermal ablation procedures. This paper presents a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) assisted finite element methodology for modeling and analysis of bio-heat transfer processes in the treatment of thermal ablation. The proposed methodology employs finite element method for discretization of the bio-heat equation, and the finite element modeling is implemented using the High-Level Shader Language of the Microsoft Direct3D 11. Simulations and comparison analyses are conducted, demonstrating computational performance improvement of up to 55.3 times using the proposed methodology.