Recent advances in mesh-based modeling of individual cells in biological fluids

The problem of modeling blood flow can be approached on different levels of accuracy. We investigate a model consisting of two major components: the fluid representing blood plasma and the elastic objects representing all types of cells in blood, e.g. red blood cells. The elastic objects are immersed in the fluid and they interact with each other. Our research is focused on spring-network models of elastic objects. We present the results concerning the scalability of meshes. We investigate the relation between mechanical properties of physical cells and the stiffness parameters of underlying meshes. Further, we present new metric that supplements energy-based approaches in cases when the energy is difficult to calculate. To demonstrate the abilities of our software implementation, we provide tests concerning the computational complexity. We show the significant speed-up caused by using templates when generating many cells with the same elastic properties. We also demonstrate the quadratic dependence of the computational time on increasing number of simulated cells. We suggest several directions for further model enhancements, such as better implementation of cell-cell collisions, inclusion of adhesion processes, monitoring the rupture of cells, and development of physically more relevant implementation of forces for some cell's elastic moduli.