PPIM: Pennes Physics-Informed Mamba for Heat-Source-Conditioned 3D Bioheat Simulation
Authors: Dongyun Lee, Kyungho Yoon, Minwoo Shin
Organizations: Department of Software, Yonsei University (Mirae Campus), Wonju, 26493, Republic of Korea · School of Mathematics and Computing, Yonsei University, Seoul, 03722, Republic of Korea
Three-dimensional bioheat simulation aims to predict transient temperature distributions in biological tissue and is commonly modeled using the Pennes bioheat equation, which combines thermal diffusion, perfusion-mediated heat loss, and external heat generation. In this study, we consider a controlled 3D Pennes bioheat simulation under a localized heat-source condition inspired by microwave ablation (MWA). To evaluate neural approximation performance, we compare three neural partial differential equation (PDE) solvers under the same controlled simulation: a spatial Fourier-feature physics-informed neural network (PINN), a generic PINNMamba temporal subsequence model, and Pennes Physics-Informed Mamba (PPIM). PPIM builds on the temporal subsequence model by incorporating conditioned heat-source input and Pennes-aware state-space model (SSM) decay initialization. All three neural models are trained under the same conditions with the same Pennes residual, and an explicit finite-difference method (FDM) solution is used only as the numerical reference. In a representative 600~s run, PPIM achieved the lowest MAE, relative L1 error, and relative L2 error among the evaluated neural solvers. Error maps further showed that the remaining PPIM errors were more concentrated near the heat-source region than across the rest of the domain. These results indicate that PPIM is effective for approximating the FDM reference final temperature field in this controlled simulation. The source code is available at https://github.com/muvYun/PPIM.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of PPIM. Normalized spatio-temporal coordinates and qnorm are concatenated to form temporal tokens, which are processed by the PPIM temporal encoder and mapped to temperature-elevation predictions.
Model
MAE (∘C)
Rel. L1 Error
Rel. L2 Error
PINN
0.1999
0.2452
0.1135
PINNMamba
0.1067
0.1309
0.0719
PPIM
0.0692
0.0849
0.0465
Table 1: Comparison of neural solvers against the FDM reference at t=600s .
Figure 2: Final heat distributions at t=600s . The field represents temperature elevation u=T−37∘C .
Figure 3: Signed and absolute error maps at t=600s . Panel (a) shows uθ−uFDM , and panel (b) shows ∣uθ−uFDM∣ .
Figure 4: Relative error contribution maps at t=600s . Panel (a) shows the pointwise normalized absolute-error contribution, and panel (b) shows the pointwise normalized squared-error contribution.
Neural PDE solvers use trainable models to approximate solutions or solution operators for partial differential equations, often with physical constraints.
High-dimensional transient heat diffusion under noisy boundary conditions exposes a fundamental limitation of classical numerical methods: accuracy degrades catastrophically where physical noise is unavoidable. This paper presents a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework as a systematic solution to this problem across one, two, and three spatial dimensions, establishing clear operational regimes that redefine solver selection in noisy thermal systems. Under 20% boundary noise in 3D, PINN sustains approximately 91% accuracy while Finite Difference Method (FDM) collapses to 36%, a clear decisive advantage. This is further confirmed in a physical copper thermal system, where PINN reduces boundary reconstruction error by 3.3 times under realistic noise conditions. This noise resilience is accompanied by a dimensionality-driven efficiency crossover: PINN requires fewer spacetime nodes than FDM in 3D while achieving superior accuracy, exposing the true cost of classical discretization at scale. These findings reframe solver selection: the decisive axis is not accuracy alone, but noise exposure and dimensionality jointly. When noise and dimensionality are both high, the classical solver paradigm is insufficient; this work provides the foundation to justify PINN as the operational standard in such regimes.
Shreesh Bhattarai, Harish Chandra Bhandari
Department of Mathematics, Kathmandu University Dhulikhel, Nepal
Accurate and efficient prediction of subsurface temperature fields is essential for the design and operation of borehole heat exchanger (BHE) systems. Here we develop a parametric hybrid analytical and physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for long-term multi-BHE simulations in heterogeneous underground. The method analytically extracts the singular line source response and enables the effective training of neural correction associated with subsurface heterogeneity. An explicit parametrization of the thermal conductivity allows physics-informed learning of a single feedforward neural network to generalize across different subsurface conditions. By formulating the correction in borehole-centered relative coordinates, the learned correction can be reused as a universal corrector through spatial and temporal superposition principles. Numerical experiments based on the infinite line source (ILS), finite line source (FLS) and moving finite line source (MFLS) models show that the hybrid method outperforms analytical approximations with stable accuracy over long simulation horizons and achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups over traditional solvers. The proposed framework therefore combines the efficiency of analytical models with the ability of numerical methods to capture heterogeneous subsurface physics, providing a fast and accurate approach for repeated long-term simulation of multi-BHE systems.
Moke Rao, Thomas Hamacher, Smajil Halilovic
Technical University of Munich, Chair of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems, Germany
Inverse problems for stiff parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), such as the inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP), are severely ill-posed: the forward map rapidly damps high-frequency interior structure before it reaches the boundary. Soft-constrained physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which embed the PDE as a residual penalty, suffer from gradient pathology in this regime and tend to fit boundary measurements while leaving the interior field essentially untouched. We propose Neural Field Thermal Tomography (NeFTY), a hard-constrained neural field framework for label-free three-dimensional inverse heat conduction. NeFTY represents the unknown diffusivity as a continuous coordinate-based neural network, and at every optimization step passes the candidate field through a differentiable implicit-Euler heat solver with harmonic-mean interface flux, so that the governing PDE holds exactly on the discretization rather than as a soft penalty. Adjoint gradients propagate the surface reconstruction error back to the network weights at solver-level memory cost, making test-time inversion tractable on a single GPU. Across synthetic 3D benchmarks, NeFTY substantially outperforms soft-constrained PINN variants and a voxel-grid baseline on label-free volumetric recovery, and it transfers to real thermography data, surpassing classical signal-processing baselines in both defect segmentation and depth estimation. Additional details at https://cab-lab-princeton.github.io/nefty/