講演要旨
Water, occupying 65-80% weight of human body, keeps circulating due to mechanical forces
in the whole body. In other words, almost all cells of living body are being exposed to different
complex fluid mechanics environments. Owing to long-term natural selection, the living body
has adapted its structure and function to its fluid mechanics environment. However, if the
fluid mechanics environment changes, physiological or/and pathological changes in the
structure and function of living body will occur accordingly.
The subject concerning the effects of mechanical factors on the biological responses,
i.e., changes in the structure and function of living body is called Mechanobiology.
Although advanced progress on cellular and molecular biology in recent years has
provided numerous biological methods for the study of mechanobiology, the prerequisite
for the study of mechanobiology is to quantitatively describe the fluid mechanical environment.
Because of the complexity in the geometry of living body (irregularity, multiscale evolution
in time and space), the fluid medium (Non-Newtonian), the flow pattern (steady/pulsatile,
laminar/turbulent, biochemical reaction), and the individual difference among living bodies,
CFD has been employed as one of important tools to analyze the fluid mechanics environment
in mechanobiology. In order to fulfill this requirement, a new direction of CFD--computational
mechanobiology--is being developed rapidly.
The talk will focus on the applications of CFD in mechanobiolgy and medical engineering,
which includes:
- Relationship between fluid mechanical factors (wall shear stress, circumferential stress,
flow separation, secondary flow, turbulent flow, mass transfer) and cardiovascular diseases
such as angiogenesis, vascular remodeling, and atherosgenesis
- Applications of CFD in the diagnosis of diseases (inverse problem in hemodynamics,
invention of medical equipment in the institute of biomechanics at Fudan university,
Virtual Vascular Project in Europe）
- Applications of CFD in tissue engineering (grafting, substitutes of biological tissues)
- CFD in traditional Chinese medicine (interstitial fluid flow may be related to the meridian
and acupuncture)
- Applications of CFD in the study of cell physiology