Characterisation of Transport Properties of Brain Tissue Using CFD

Title: Characterization of Transport Properties of Drugs in Brain Tissue Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Author: Tian Yuan, Wenbo Zhan, Daniele Dini

Conference: European consortium for mathematics in industry, 13-15 April 2021, Online due to COVID

Fig: Pressure distribution in the reconstrcuted representative microstructure of brain tissue

Abstract:

Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is a promising drug delivery technique for treating brain diseases. With the aim to bypass the blood-brain barrier which can successfully reduce over 98% of drug bioavailability in brain in routine pharmacotherapy, CED has been developed to directly infuse drugs into lesion through a tuned catheter. This development can not only lower the drug dose for administration but also reduce the risk of side effects caused by drug systemic toxicity. In CED, the transportation, accumulation, and effectiveness of the delivered drugs strongly depend on the flow field in the brain, which is fundamentally regulated by the transport properties of brain tissue. In other words, if the flow field along the transportation path in the brain could be predicted beforehand, the effciency of this technique would be further improved. Therefore, in this paper, we firstly reconstructed the cross and longitudinal sections of brain tissue (white matter) based on imaging data and Matlab coding. And then quantified permeability of the brain tissue in different directions with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation in COMSOL Multiphysics. Meanwhile, the diffusivity of different particles was also obtained based on fluid-particle interaction simulation. Finally, the isotropic permeability of the brain tissue and diffusivity of the drug particles were obtained and validated with published experimental data under the same working condition.