On November 15, 2023, the public defense of the doctoral thesis of Mikołaj Stryczyński, MSc., entitled. “Modeling of oncological hyperthermia using equations with two delay times“. The dissertation was promoted by Prof. Ewa Majchrzak, and reviewed by Prof. Liliana Rybarska-Rusinek from Rzeszow University of Technology, Prof. Jacek Leszczynski, from University of Science and Technology in Cracow, and Prof. Stanisław Kukla, form Czestochowa University of Technology. The Doctoral Committee has approved requests to the Council of the Discipline of Mechanical Engineering to grant Mikołaj Stryczyński, MSc., the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences in the discipline of Mechanical Engineering, and to honor his dissertation.
One of the methods supporting cancer treatment is artificial hyperthermia, i.e. local heating of the tumor in order to destroy it. The doctoral thesis concerns the
modeling of high-temperature hyperthermia. The mathematical model is based on
a dual-phase lag equation, in which the thermophysical parameters of the tissue vary with temperature. The heating of the biological tissue was carried out by adopting the appropriate boundary condition or by introducing the source function into the dual-phase lag equation. Tissue heating with a laser beam is also considered. In this case, the variability of optical parameters is taken into account using the Arrhenius integral, which is a measure of the degree of tissue destruction.
Temperature distributions and the degree of destruction of the tumor tissue were also analyzed, taking into account the presence of a thermally significant blood vessel. The tasks have been solved using the implicit finite difference scheme. Algorithms and self-written computer programs in C++ (solver) and Python (post-processing) were developed. The results of numerical computations for different variants of heating the analyzed domain are also presented. In the final part of the work the conclusions and also the directions for further research are formulated.
