Simulating pulmonary and coronary blood flow

Jay Mackenzie (University of Glasgow )

Thursday 9th October 14:00-15:00
Maths 311B

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases and cancers are the leading cause of death worldwide. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death world-wide. Given this, there is broad interest to understand disease mechanism and mechanisms of impairment both of cardiovascular diseases and cancers, and their treatments. Mathematical models are useful tools that can allow us deeper insight into disease mechanisms and help drive forward understanding of these processes. Mathematical models have benefits over animal models in that they are often relatively cheap, there are fewer ethical concerns that pertain to a mathematical model, and it is often easier to simulate (and validate) than measure certain physiologically interesting quantities.

We wish to model blood flow and pressure in the human pulmonary and coronary systemic circulation. I will present the derivation of a mathematical model for blood flow in elastic walled vessels including some discussion of the boundary conditions we use and the scenarios in which certain boundary conditions are applicable. Mainly, we will focus on the construction of computational domains that represent the vasculature. We will discuss how changing the shape of the vasculature changes the simulated flow, and how this relates to mathematical modelling in health care applications.

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