A multiphase tracking of perfusion through in silico dense tumor domain

Dense fibrous constitution of solid tumors exerts high resistance to diffusive transport; additionally, the scarcity of blood and lymphatic flows hinders convection. Such formations are associated with over 85% of cancers including pancreatic cancer, which is this project's clinical condition of interest. The complexity of fluidic transport mechanisms in such tumor environments is still not well-explored. To that end, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling presents a cost-effective strategy for a systematic investigation on how different physicochemical factors tend to affect plasma uptake and outflow at the tumor vasculature. In this talk, we will present our findings for a simple biomimetic tumor geometry with three different fenestra opening sizes, viz. 0.3, 0.8, and 1.3 µm, thereby mimicking varying degrees of leakiness. The plasma percolation into the tumor extracellular space is tracked and characterized, through simulating a reduced order 3-phase system that comprises plasma, RBCs (red blood cells or erythrocytes), and air voids. The exercise assumes transient flow, viscous-laminar model. We are also applying the same in silico framework to track transport in realistic geometries built from imaging data of solid pancreatic tumors engrafted in mouse xenograft models.