Computational study of occlusion-triggered responses in small vascular network

摘要

While vasoreactivity of an individual blood vessel is quite well studied, much less is known about stimulus-triggered behavior of microcirculatory networks in situ. The available experimental data on the topic suggestthat the response pattern of the network, being the coordinated change of ow through the group of vessels, aswell as adjustment of their diameters, often can be found inconsistent with what is expected from "system ofelastic tubes". Physiologically, this is due to autoregulation of vascular tone by means of a number of pathways,mediated by cells that form two main cellular layers - the endothelial cells and the vascular smooth muscle cells.Since it is still not easy to measure simultaneously both the ow/diameter and the degree of activation of smoothmuscle cells, the mathematical modeling study on the topic is very suitable. In this work, we present the resultsof the modeling study performed on a set of 20 dierent variants of 14-vessels vascular tree. Our results showthree distinctive stages of vascular response to the abrupt change of conditions (occlusion of one of the vessels).