Thermal transport measurement and modeling in biological tissues is of increasing importance in treatments of cardiovascular disease affecting millions of patients in the U.S. every year. For instance, in regenerative medicine heart valves and blood vessels are routinely cryopreserved and transplanted in patients with damaged cardiovascular function. Further, in cardiac surgery and cardiology, thermal probes and catheters are used to focally heat or cool blood vessels to treat atrial fibrillation, peripheral artery disease and renal hypertension (i.e. renal artery). In these examples the controlled and reproducible use of a thermal process can either preserve or destroy tissues with characteristic dimensions at the millimeter scale. Unfortunately, precise knowledge of the thermal properties that govern heat transfer within these thin cardiovascular tissues is currently lacking in the literature.
Several techniques currently exist for measuring the thermal conductivity of bulk biological tissues, including the guarded hot plate method and the embedded thermistor method...
