Multifield modeling of brain development

Brain development involves precisely orchestrated genetic, biochemical, and mechanical events. This work brings a new understanding of brain development by calibrating and validating a biomechanical model of neuronal migration to an innovative experimental approach for labeling and tracing neurons in the developing ferret in vivo. The proposed model builds upon previous work by de Rooij and Kuhl (2018), which introduced volume growth governed by cell density, with neuronal migration modeled as an advection-diffusion process. As a significant improvement, we define multiple cell types instead of a single cell density to capture more complex neuronal migration – younger neurons bypass their older counterparts to reside near the outer surface – in the experiments (Shinmyo et al., 2017). We numerically implement our model in Abaqus/Standard (2020) by writing user-defined element (UEL) subroutines. Our model is calibrated to experimental data using uteroelectroporation (IUE) in ferret brains to visualize and track cohorts of neurons born at different stages of embryonic development. The simulations with calibrated parameters qualitatively capture the cortical folding in ferret brains.