A Physics-Based Modeling and Real-Time Simulation of Biomechanical Diffusion Process Through Optical Imaged Alveolar Tissues on Graphical Processing Units

Tissue engineering has broad applications from creating the much-needed engineered tissue and organ structures for regenerative medicine to providing in vitro testbeds for drug testing. In the latter, application domain, creating alveolar lung tissue, and simulating the diffusion process of oxygen and other possible agents from 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 chapter, 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, 3D 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 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.