• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.85-91
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• 2023

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) occurs when abdominal pressure increases, such as sneezing, exercising, and laughing. Surgical and non-surgical treatments are the common methods of SUI treatment; however, the conventional treatments still require continuous and invasive treatment. Laser have been used to treat SUI, but excessive temperature increase often causes thermal burn on urethra tissue. Therefore, the optimal conditions must be considered to minimize the thermal damage for the laser treatment. The current study investigated the feasibility of the laser irradiation condition for SUI treatment using non-ablative 980 nm laser from a safety perspective through numerical simulations. COMSOL Multiphysics was used to analyze the numerical simulation model. The Pennes bioheat equation with the Beer's law was used to confirm spatio-temporal temperature distributions, and Arrhenius equation defined the thermal damage caused by the laser-induced heat. Ex vivo porcine urethral tissue was tested to validate the extent of both temperature distribution and thermal damage. The temperature distribution was symmetrical and uniformly observed in the urethra tissue. A muscle layer had a higher temperature (28.3 ℃) than mucosal (23.4 ℃) and submucosal layers (25.5 ℃). MT staining revealed no heat-induced collagen and muscle damage. Both control and treated groups showed the equivalent thickness and area of the urethral mucosal layer. Therefore, the proposed numerical simulation can predict the appropriate irradiation condition (20 W for 15 s) for the SUI treatment with minimal temperature-induced tissue.