Abstract
As a blood clot forms, grows, deforms, and embolizes following a vascular injury, local clot-flow inter-actions lead to a highly dynamic flow environment. The local flow influences transport of biochemical species relevant for clotting, and determines the forces on the clot that in turn lead to clot deformation and embolization. Despite this central role, quantitative characterization of this dynamic clot-flow in-teraction and flow environment in the clot neighborhood remains a major challenge. Here, we propose an approach that integrates dynamic intravital imaging with computer geometric modeling and compu-tational flow and transport modeling to develop a unified in silico framework to quantify the dynamic clot-flow interactions. We outline the development of the methodology referred to as Intravital Inte-grated In Silico Modeling or IVISim, and then demonstrate the method on a sample set of simulations comprising hemostasis following laser injury in two mouse cremaster arteriole injury model data: one wild-type mouse case, and one diYF knockout mouse case. Simulation predictions are verified against experimental observations of transport of caged fluorescent Albumin (cAlb) in both models. Through these simulations, we illustrate how the IVISim methodology can provide insights into hemostatic pro-cesses, the role of flow and clot-flow interactions, and differentiate between different biological model scenarios and parameter variations.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
