The use of lasers in medical applications has dramatically increased over the past half century. For treatment quality, the control of thermal damage is absolutely necessary. Living tissue is highly non-homogenous, and the effect of local non-equilibrium on the thermal behavior should be accounted. Therefore, this work uses the dual-phase-lag model to analyze thermal response for estimating thermal damage in laser-irradiated biological tissue. The transport behavior of laser light in the tissue is assumed as highly absorbed and strongly scattered, respectively. Thermal damage is assessed with the rate process equation. The effects of blood perfusion and metabolic heat generation on thermal response and thermal damage are explored. The reliability of the present results has been evidenced through comparison with the literature. The results show the DPL bio-heat transfer equation with the effect of blood perfusion, even with the space-dependent source term, can be reduced to the Fourier bio-heat transfer equation for tau(q) = tau(T). (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.