Simulation of glioblastoma growth using a 3D multispecies tumor model with mass effect

In this article, we present a multispecies reaction-advection-diffusion partial differential equation coupled with linear elasticity for modeling tumor growth. The model aims to capture the phenomenological features of glioblastoma multiforme observed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. These include enhancing and necrotic tumor structures, brain edema and the so-called "mass effect", a term-of-art that refers to the deformation of brain tissue due to the presence of the tumor. The multispecies model accounts for proliferating, invasive and necrotic tumor cells as well as a simple model for nutrition consumption and tumor-induced brain edema. The coupling of the model with linear elasticity equations with variable coefficients allows us to capture the mechanical deformations due to the tumor growth on surrounding tissues. We present the overall formulation along with a novel operator-splitting scheme with components that include linearly-implicit preconditioned elliptic solvers, and a semi-Lagrangian method for advection. We also present results showing simulated MRI images which highlight the capability of our method to capture the overall structure of glioblastomas in MRIs.