Examples of the presently disclosed technology provide new systems and methods for real-time temperature propagation and tissue damage visualization during laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) procedures that do not rely on real-time MR imaging. Accordingly, examples enable performance of LITT procedures in regular operating rooms lacking MR-equipment-thereby reducing costs and improving availability for LITT procedures. Examples achieve these advantages by leveraging discretized patient-specific 3D brain structure representations to perform numerical methods for solving partial differential equations that estimate real-time (or close to real-time) temperature propagation within a patient's brain during a LITT procedure.