Abstract
Among the vital processes of cutaneous wound healing are epithelialization and angiogenesis. The former leads to the successful closure of the wound while the latter ensures that nutrients are delivered to the wound region during and after healing is completed. These processes are regulated by various cytokines and growth factors that subtend their proliferation and migration into the wound region until full healing is attained. Wound epithelialization can be enhanced by the administration of epidermal stem cells (ESC) or impaired by the presence of an infection. This paper uses the Eden model of a growing cluster to independently simulate the processes of epithelialization and angiogenesis in a cutaneous wound for different geometries. Further, simulations illustrating bacterial infection are provided. Our simulation results demonstrate contraction and closure for any wound geometry due to a collective migration of epidermal cells from the wound edge in fractal form and the diffusion of capillary sprouts with the laying down of capillary blocks behind moving tips into the wound area.
Highlights
Many different biological interactions involving various cells and chemicals are responsible for the healing of skin wounds
The variants of Eden model for cluster growth presented above are employed to simulate the processes of epithelialization and angiogenesis
The model does not distinctively incorporate growth factors and assumes that all processes required for epithelialization or angiogenesis are satisfied
Summary
Many different biological interactions involving various cells and chemicals are responsible for the healing of skin wounds. The second phase constitutes replacement of lost tissue to fill and cover the entire wound space This is achieved by the secretion of growth factors that promote the recruitment and proliferation of vascular endothelial cells and epidermal cells. The process by which new blood capillaries grow into a wound space after injury is known as angiogenesis and it is an important part of the proliferative phase of healing. We use the Eden model which is a very simple and basic aggregation method to address two different aspects of wound healing, namely, re-epithelialization, and angiogenesis. We begin by considering a variant of the Eden model for epithelialization that adapts and improves on the shrinking cluster approach in [16], and that demonstrates wound contraction and closure. The simplicity of implementation and computational efficiency of our Eden variants are attributed to the few parameters required by the procedures
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