On the Adaptive Time-Stepping in Radio-Frequency Liver Ablation Simulation: Some Preliminary Results

Radio-frequency ablation is a low invasive technique for treatment of liver tumors. This work concerns the mathematical modeling and computer simulation of the heat transfer process. The core is solving the time-dependent partial differential equation of parabolic type. Instead of a uniform discretization of the considered time interval, an adaptive time-stepping procedure is applied in an effort to decrease the simulation time. The procedure is based on the local comparison of the Crank Nicholson and backward Euler approximations. Results of some preliminary numerical experiments performed on a selected test problems are presented and discussed.