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Modeling tumor growth with peridynamics

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Abstract

Computational models of tumors have the potential to connect observations made on the cellular and the tissue scales. With cellular scale models, each cell can be treated as a discrete entity, while tissue scale models typically represent tumors as a continuum. Though the discrete approach often enables a more mechanistic and biologically driven description of cellular behavior, it is often computationally intractable on the tissue scale. Here, we adapt peridynamics, a theoretical and computational approach designed to unify the mechanics of discrete and continuous media, for the growth of biological materials. The result is a computational model for tumor growth that can represent either individual cells or the tissue as a whole. We take advantage of the flexibility provided by the peridynamic framework to implement a cell division mechanism, motivated by the fact that cell division is the mechanism driving tumor growth. This paper provides a general framework for implementing a new tumor growth modeling technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Emma Lejeune & Christian Linder

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  1. Emma Lejeune
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  2. Christian Linder
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Correspondence to Christian Linder.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-114747.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Lejeune, E., Linder, C. Modeling tumor growth with peridynamics. Biomech Model Mechanobiol 16, 1141–1157 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-017-0876-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-017-0876-8

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