THE POROUS MEDIA THEORY APPLIED TO RADIO FREQUENCY CATHETER ABLATION

A heart arrhythmia consists of an abnormal heartbeat rate. This can be caused by abnormal cells that cause irregular electrical signals through the chambers of the heart. When this occurs, the heart is not pumping blood well. A technique that is used for some types of arrhythmias consists of using induced heat through the heart by using a catheter. This heat destroys the abnormal tissue without any damage into the rest of the heart, that may occur if thermal doses are not set up properly. In this work, porous media theory is employed to simulate heat transfer during cardiac ablation. Assuming that the heated zone is made of two phases (blood and tissue), governing equations are volumetrically-averaged over Representative Elementary Volumes (REVs) through the computational domain. The heat source term is modeled using the Laplace equation, along with the electric voltage field. Governing equations are numerically solved with the finite element code COMSOL Multiphysics. Results are compared with other models in literature, in order to show the feasibility of this approach to predict heat transfer during radiofrequency catheter ablation.