A computational modeling of blood flow in asymmetrically bifurcating microvessels and its experimental validation

Abstract

Microvascular transport is complex due to its heterogeneity. Many researchers have been developing mathematical and computational models in predicting microvascular geometries and blood transport. However, previous works were focused on developing simulation models, not on validating suggested models with microvascular geometry and blood flow in the real microvasculature. In this paper, we suggest a computational model for microvascular transport with experimental validation in its geometry and blood flow. The geometry is generated by controlling asymmetric conditions of microvascular network. Also, the blood flow in microvascular networks is predicted by considering in vivo viscosity, Poiseuille flow model, and hematocrit redistribution by plasma skimming. The suggested model is validated by the measured data in rat mesentery. Also, the microvascular transport in a case of mouse cortex is predicted and compared against experimental data to check applicability of the suggested model.

Adaptive constrained constructive optimisation for complex vascularisation processes

“…10 were generated in 59.96 and 22.99 hours (wall clock time) for DCCO and CCO respectively, using an Intel Xeon Gold 5218 CPU at 2.30GHz with 128 GB RAM. It is important to mention that neither of the algorithms was optimised in terms of performance, and more efficient methods have been proposed in the literature 42 . Nonetheless, the main focus of our contribution was in the improvement of modelling capabilities of CCO method to deal with complex realistic scenarios and efficiency was out of the focus of this work.…”

“…However, a more practical approach in such a scenario would be to exploit a multi-scale paradigm, in which the proposed approach is employed to generate the larger scale vessels that describe the main vascular patterns ( e.g. order of vessels) and generate the remaining vessels with faster filling techniques applied locally in predefined representative vascular domains 23 , 42 to obtain a larger speedup. Note that the latter small-scale vessels are expected to be more homogeneous without different architectural traits, and the vascularisation could be executed in an “embarrassingly parallel” manner.…”

“…More complex models for viscosity – e.g. accounting for plasma skimming effect and, consequently, variable hematocrit discharge 42 , 67 – can be straightforwardly implemented with the proposed strategy by modifying the viscosity update (see Algorithm 1, line 5) with the chosen viscosity model.…”

“…In particular, the family of CCO algorithms addresses different types of study involving the influence of anatomical variability 44 , 49 – 53 , bifurcation asymmetries 42 , 54 , 55 , fractal properties 56 , staged-growth 46 , 57 , shear stress distribution 58 , 59 , among others 43 , 60 – 62 . Variants have also been proposed either to recreate more complex vascular networks in hollow organs 23 , 43 , 44 , 46 , 63 , 64 , or to speed-up the construction of such networks 46 , 65 .…”

Regenerated Microvascular Networks in Ischemic Skeletal Muscle

“…Models have evolved to be predictive and that can account for the non-linear rheology, changing hematocrits, viscosity, and the complex geometries of the microcirculation. Plasma skimming is one example of a biophysical process important to the microcirculation that has been tackled by advanced modeling (Lee et al, 2018;Possenti et al, 2019). This phenomenon entails phase separation at microvascular bifurcations.…”