To improve the existing thermal models of the human head, we incorporate the effect of the temperature over the metabolic heat generation, the regulatory processes that control the cerebral blood perfusion and their dependence on physiological parameters like, the mean arterial blood pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide, and the cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption.The introduction of these parameters in a thermal model gives information about how specific conditions, such as brain edema, hypoxia, hypercapnia, or hypotension, affect the temperature distribution within the brain. Our work, on a layered head model, shows that variations of the physiological parameters have profound effect on the temperature gradients within the head. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.