Microscale Flow Dynamics of Red Blood Cells in Microchannels: An Experimental and Numerical Analysis

Abstract

The book collects the state-of-the-art research, methods and new trends on the subject of computational vision and medical image processing contributing to the development of these knowledge areas. PrefaceNowadays, computational methodologies of signal processing and imaging analysis for 2D, 3D and even 4D data are commonly used for various applications in society. For example, Computational Vision systems are progressively used for surveillance tasks, traffic analysis, recognition process, inspection purposes, human-machine interfaces, 3D vision and deformation analysis.One of the main characteristics of the Computational Vision domain is its intermultidisciplinary nature. In fact, in this domain, methodologies of several other fundamental sciences, such as Informatics, Mathematics, Statistics, Psychology, Mechanics and Physics are regularly used. Besides this inter-multidisciplinary characteristic, one of the main rationale that promotes the continuous effort being made in this area of human knowledge is the number of applications in the medical area. For instance, statistical or physical procedures on medical images can be used in order to model the represented structures. This modelling can have different goals, for example: shape reconstruction, segmentation, registration, behavioural interpretation and simulation, motion and deformation analysis, virtual reality, computer-assisted therapy or tissue characterization.The main objective of the ECCOMAS Thematic Conferences on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing (VIPimage) is to promote a comprehensive forum for discussion on the recent advances in the related fields and try to identify areas of potential collaboration between researchers of different sciences.This book contains the extended versions of nineteen papers selected from works presented at the second ECCOMAS thematic conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image processing (VIPimage 2009), which was held at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Porto, Portugal. It gathers together the state-of-the-art on the subject of Computational Vision and Medical Image processing contributing to the development of these knowledge areas and showing new trends in these fields.The Editors would like to take this opportunity to thank to the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences, the Abstract The blood flow dynamics in microcirculation depends strongly on the microvascular networks composed with short irregular vessel segments which are linked by numerous bifurcations. This paper presents the application of a confocal micro-PTV system to track RBCs through a rectangular polydimethysiloxane (PDMS) microchannel with a bifurcation. By using a confocal micro-PTV system, we have measured the effect of bifurcation on the flow behaviour of both fluorescent particles diluted in pure water and RBCs in concentrated suspensions. After performing simulations with the commercial finite element software package POLYFLOW R , some experimental results were compared with the nume...

Cell-free layer analysis in a polydimethysiloxane microchannel: a global approach

“…Blood is a complex fluid composed mainly of suspended red blood cells (RBCs) within plasma where RBCs are responsible for the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the body and removal of carbon dioxide and metabolic wastes from tissues. Throughout the years, several experimental methods were performed in both in vivo (Maeda, 1996;Pries and Secomb, 1994;Suzuki et al, 1996;Kim et al, 2009) and in vitro (Faustino et al, 2014;Goldsmith and Turitto, 1986;Lima et al, 2006Lima et al, , 2008Lima et al, , 2009aLima et al, , 2009bRodrigues et al, 2014) environments, in an attempt to understand the flow behaviour of RBCs in microchannels and microvessels. These studies have produced significant findings on the blood rheological properties at a micro-scale level.…”

“…Recently due to the advances of the computational techniques and computing power, several numerical models have been proposed based on a multiphase approach, in which the blood is considered as a multiphase suspension of deformable particles and where levels of submodelling for the blood cells behaviour are also taken into account. Some examples for this type of approach are the boundary element method (Omori et al, 2011), the immersed boundary method (Bagchi, 2007;Eggleton and Popel, 1998), the lattice Boltzmann method (Dupin et al 2007) the dissipative particle dynamics method (Fedosov et al, 2010), the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method (Imai et al, 2010;Tsubota et al, 2006aTsubota et al, , 2006bGambaruto, 2015) and spring-network model based on the minimum energy concept (Lima et al, 2009a(Lima et al, , 2009bNakamura et al, 2013). Reviews on these numerical methods can be found at Liu et al (2006), Yamaguchi et al (2006) and Lima et al (2012).…”

Computational study of blood flow in microchannels

“…It is known that a RBC depletion region exists near the walls and the thickness of this layer can be influenced by the flow rate and the hematocrit (see [33,35,49] for more details). It has also been observed that the thickness of the RBC depletion layer (or the plasma skimming layer) was less than about two microns in a tube and decreases as the hematocrit increases, which, in turn, means that the RBC concentration is uniformly distributed and depleted near the walls.…”

“…Shear lift and spin lift forces are used to describe the non-uniform concentration of RBCs [33,34] and plasma layer (or RBC depletion layer) [35]. Saffman [36,37] derived an expression for the shear lift force on a small particle in uniform shear.…”

Hemodynamics in the Microcirculation and in Microfluidics

“…Lima et al 88 measured blood-cell suspension flow using a confocal lPIV method. They extended the 2D velocity profile of cell suspension flow in a square microchannel to 3D flow fields by measuring several heights of focal planes.…”