A new in-silico tool for quantifying the impact of blood flow dynamics on cerebral capillary activity

The cerebral function is tightly coupled with blood flow autoregulation, which modulates the diameter of small vessels for satisfying the local brain metabolic needs. Recent experimental evidence showed that mechanical forces exerted by blood flow on capillary wall has a profound effect on the transmission of the signal initiating the regulation and this function is expected to be impaired across different pathological conditions such as hypertension, stroke and vascular ageing. So far, this phenomenon can be only studied by means of ex-vivo animal experiments, where the microvascular blood flow remains mostly uncertain. Indeed, although vascular cells activity can be measured through fluorescence microscopy, the direct measurement of the mechanical forces initiating the considered vascular regulatory pathways is not possible.

This project aims to characterize the mechanical interaction between capillary wall and blood flow in ex-vivo preparations by using computational modelling. We will compute fluid mechanical forces exerted over capillary networks across different experimental conditions and by accounting for pressure-dependent regulatory mechanisms (which have already been modelled in our previous works).
The developed tool will be of great use for experimentalists because it will allow to reconstruct the fluid-dynamic field across different experimental settings and to establish thresholds for characterizing different observed cellular activity levels.