A Physics-based Modeling and Real-time Simulation of Biomechanical Diffusion Process through Optical Imaged Alveolar Tissues on Graphical Processing Units
Abstract
Tissue engineering has broad applications fro1n creating the much needed
engineered tissue and organ structures for regenerative medicine to providing
in vitro testbeds for drug testing. In the later, application domain, creating alveolar
lung tissue and simulating the diffusion process of oxygen and other possible
agents front the air into the blood stream as well as modeling the removal of
carbon dioxide and other possible entities-from the blood stream are of critical importance to simulating lung functions in various environments. In this paper, we
propose a physics-based model to simulate the alveolar gas exchange and the alveolar diffusion process. Tissue engineers, for the first time may utilize these simulation results to better understand the underlying gas exchange process and
properly adjust the tissue growing cycles. In this work, alveolar tissues are imaged
by means of an Optical Coherence Microscopy (OCM) system developed in our
laboratory. As a consequence, 30 alveoli tissue data with its inherent complex
boundary is taken as input to the simulation system, which is based on computational fluid mechanics in simulating the alveolar gas exchange. The visualization
and the simulation of diffusion of the air into the blood through of the alveoli tissue is performed using a state-of·art Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Results
show the real-time simulation of the gas exchange through the 2D alveoli tissue.