Upscaling between an agent-based model (smoothed particle approach) and a continuum-based model for skin contractions

Abstract

Skin contraction is an important biophysical process that takes place during and after recovery of deep tissue injury. This process is mainly caused by fibroblasts (skin cells) and myofibroblasts (differentiated fibroblasts which exert larger pulling forces and produce larger amounts of collagen) that both exert pulling forces on the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM). Modelling is done in multiple scales: agent-based modelling on the microscale and continuum-based modelling on the macroscale. In this manuscript we present some results from our study of the connection between these scales. For the one-dimensional case, we managed to rigorously establish the link between the two modelling approaches for both closed-form solutions and finite-element approximations. For the multi-dimensional case, we computationally evidence the connection between the agent-based and continuum-based modelling approaches.