A fast numerical method for oxygen supply in tissue with complex blood vessel network

Abstract

Angiogenesis plays an essential role in many pathological processes such as tumor growth, wound healing, and keloid development. Low oxygen level is the main driving stimulus for angiogenesis. In an animal tissue, the oxygen level is mainly determined by three effects—the oxygen delivery through blood flow in a refined vessel network, the oxygen diffusion from blood to tissue, and the oxygen consumption in cells. Evaluation of the oxygen field is usually the bottleneck in large scale modeling and simulation of angiogenesis and related physiological processes. In this work, a fast numerical method is developed for the simulation of oxygen supply in tissue with a large-scale complex vessel network. This method employs an implicit finite-difference scheme to compute the oxygen field. By virtue of an oxygen source distribution technique from vessel center lines to mesh points and a corresponding post-processing technique that eliminate the local numerical error induced by source distribution, square mesh with relatively large mesh sizes can be applied while sufficient numerical accuracy is maintained. The new method has computational complexity which is slightly higher than linear with respect to the number of mesh points and has a convergence order which is slightly lower than second order with respect to the mesh size. With this new method, accurate evaluation of the oxygen field in a fully vascularized tissue on the scale of centimeter becomes possible.