Computational model of flow-tissue interactions in intussusceptive angiogenesis

Angiogenesis, the growth of vascular structures, is a complex biological process which has long puzzled scientists. Better physiological understanding of this phenomenon could result in many useful medical applications such as the development of new methods for cancer therapy. We report on the development of a simple computational model of micro-vascular structure formation in intussusceptive angiogenesis observed in vivo. The tissue is represented by a discrete set of basic structural entities and flow conditions within the resulting domain are obtained by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. The tissue is then remodelled according to the tangential shear stress while approximating advection by means of simple non-diffusive heuristics. The updated tissue geometry then becomes the input for the next remodelling step. The model, consisting of steady-state flow and a simple mechanistic tissue response, successfully predicts bifurcation formation and micro-vessel separation in a porous cellular medium. This opens new modelling possibilities in computational studies of the cellular transport involved in micro-vascular growth.