From soils to soft biological tissues, there are many examples of materials that can be modelled as highly deformable porous media, characterised by a strong coupling between mechanical stimulation and fluid flow due to complex rearrangements of the pore space. In both contexts – subsurface geomechanics and living-tissue biomechanics or tissue engineering – the effects of large periodic...
Keywords: Blood-flow simulation, aneurysm, pulsatile flow, porous media, lattice Boltzmann method
Cardiovascular diseases, such as cranial aneurysm or arterial stenosis, rank among the top global causes of death. Therefore, their genesis and treatment are subject of active, interdisciplinary research ranging from medical science via biology, chemistry and physics through to mathematics....
Ultrasound has been found to improve the delivery of therapeutic agents into
tumors thereby improving the therapeutic response in cancer treatment [1].
Acoustic streaming which is the net movement of fluid generated by propagation
of sound waves is one of the many proposed mechanisms for this improvement.
However, it would be of great advantage to have an experimentally validated
model in...
Tracer experiments are used to assess the transport of solutes and water in brain tissue. Only sparse information is available about the mechanisms and major pathways of water and some solutes entering (infiltration, perfusion) and leaving (clearance) the functional brain tissue. Moreover, there are three main issues with current experimental data when it comes to the quantification of...
Introduction:
The distribution of red blood cells (RBCs) in the microvasculature is an important factor for the supply of the tissue with oxygen. It is known that the RBC distribution is spatially and temporally heterogeneous. One of the causes for the heterogenous distribution are lingering RBCs (LRBCs), i.e., RBCs which remain temporarily stuck at the apex of diverging...
Blood microcirculation supplies neurons with oxygen and nutrients, and contributes to clearing their neurotoxic waste, through a dense capillary network connected to larger tree-like vessels. This complex microvascular architecture results in highly heterogeneous blood flow and travel time distributions, whose origin and consequences on brain pathophysiology are poorly understood. Here, we...
Network structures can be detected in almost every biological system, since they are often responsible for the transport of fluids, nutrients or oxygen. Such a network structure is for example a blood vessel network supplying organs with oxygenated blood or removing metabolic waste from the tissue [1]. A further example is the root network of a plant, ensuring the water supply of the...
We focus on the contractive forces exerted by fibroblast cells during dermal wound healing. To capture these effects, we construct and analyze two modeling approaches under the assumption of linearized elasticity. The first approach introduces a collection of point forces on the boundary of each fibroblast cell and uses a superimposition principle. The resulting partial differential equation...
Intracellular transport of macromolecules is essential to numerous biological functions, particularly for apoptosis (programmed cell death). During this process, specialised proteins called caspases are produced and transported within the cell. Their activity leads to the reorganisation of cytoplasmic structures, including the actin cytoskeleton. The rearrangement of this fibrous structure may...
