A Multiscale and Multiphase Model of Function‐Perfusion Growth Processes in the Human Liver

Abstract

Due to an ageing society and unhealthy living conditions, liver diseases like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or liver cancer will account for an increasing proportion of deaths in the coming years. Using a mathematical model, the underlying function-perfusion processes of both diseases are investigated. We developed a multiscale and multiphase model for the simulation of hepatic processes on the lobular and cell scale. The lobular scale is described with partial differential equations (PDEs) based on the Theory of Porous Media (TPM), whereas on the cellular scale the metabolic processes are calculated using ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Since NAFLD and the development of a liver tumor lead to tissue growth as well as changes in the blood perfusion, growth and remodelling processes in the human liver are evaluated.

Quantifying Fat Zonation in Liver Lobules: An IntegratedMultiscale In-silico Model Combining DisturbedMicroperfusion and Fat Metabolism via aContinuum-Biomechanical Bi-scale, Tri-phasic Approach

“…While simulating liver diseases to demonstrate the growth capability of the liver during fat accumulation leading to MASLD, several models deal with the tissue remodeling and alterations in the elasticity of the liver lobule. Waschinsky et al (2016), Lambers et al (2021Lambers et al ( , 2019 or Lambers (2023) focus on the effects of growth due to a high-fat diet, as well as other models using a one-phasic, cf. Menzel and Kuhl (2012), or a bi-phasic, cf.…”

Micro Manager: a Python package for adaptive and flexible two-scale coupling

“…Two-scale coupled simulations have already been done in several application areas, such as porous media (e.g., Bastidas et al, 2021;Gärttner et al, 2020), computational mechanics (e.g., Fritzen et al, 2019) and biomechanics (e.g., Lambers et al, 2021). For each of these publications, the coupling software is implemented from scratch.…”

Application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Liver Biomechanics: A Systematic Review

“…Suffering from NAFLD, fat vacuoles are stored in the hepatocytes. This disease, which occurs due to obesity or unhealthy living conditions, has been considered in computational models via homogenization approach on the lobular scale (Ricken et al, 2018;Lambers et al, 2019Lambers et al, , 2021Ricken and Lambers, 2019), simulating fat accumulation and tissue repair (Holzhütter and Berndt, 2020), via ML (Deo and Panigrahi, 2019), focusing on zonated fat accumulation (Ashworth et al, 2016) or to investigate the influence of underlying metabolic processes (Naik et al, 2014;Wallstab et al, 2017;Maldonado et al, 2018). Detoxification of drugs and toxins is one of the main functions of the human liver.…”