Speaker
Description
Angiogenesis is a hallmark of tumor growth. Strikingly, tumor vascular networks present a non-hierarchical, dense, high-permeability vascular structure. To better design personalised treatment strategies, it is important to characterise and understand the function of these altered vascular networks in different scenarios - namely, how does oxygen perfusion depend on vessel density.
In this work we simulate two and three-dimensional vessel networks to investigate how the progressive addition of vessels between pre-existing ones alters the fluid flow through the network and tissue perfusion. The proposed method consists in the implementation of an algorithm that builds a denser vessel network by introducing new vessels in a controlled manner.
We introduce a novel measure to describe how tissue perfusion depends on vessel density for different flow, pressure and vessel permeability constraints. The differences observed suggest that tumour neo-vessel networks present a wide range of perfusion extents depending on network morphology and vessel integrity. We proceed to propose strategies to probe the function of tumor vascular networks in patients.
