  Real-time analysis of bio-heat transfer is very beneficial in improving
clinical outcomes of hyperthermia and thermal ablative treatments but
challenging to achieve due to large computational costs. This paper presents a
fast numerical algorithm well suited for real-time solutions of bio-heat
transfer, and it achieves real-time computation via the (i) computationally
efficient explicit dynamics in the temporal domain, (ii) element-level thermal
load computation, (iii) computationally efficient finite elements, (iv)
explicit formulation for unknown nodal temperature, and (v) pre-computation of
constant simulation matrices and parameters, all of which lead to a significant
reduction in computation time for fast run-time computation. The proposed
methodology considers temperature-dependent thermal properties for nonlinear
characteristics of bio-heat transfer in soft tissue. Utilising a parallel
execution, the proposed method achieves computation time reduction of 107.71
and 274.57 times compared to those of with and without parallelisation of the
commercial finite element codes if temperature-dependent thermal properties are
considered, and 303.07 and 772.58 times if temperature-independent thermal
properties are considered, far exceeding the computational performance of the
commercial finite element codes, presenting great potential in real-time
predictive analysis of tissue temperature for planning, optimisation and
evaluation of thermo-therapeutic treatments. The source code is available at
https://github.com/jinaojakezhang/FEDFEMBioheat.
