Modeling Patient-Specific Magnetic Drug Targeting Within the Intracranial Vasculature.

Drug targeting promises to substantially enhance future therapies, for example through the focussing of chemotherapeutic drugs at the site of a tumor, thus reducing the exposure of healthy tissue to unwanted damage. Promising work on the steering of medication in the human body employs magnetic fields acting on nanoparticles made of paramagnetic materials. We develop a computational tool to aid in the optimization of the physical parameters of these particles and the magnetic configuration, estimating the fraction of particles reaching a given target site in a large patient-specific vascular system for different physiological states (heart rate, cardiac output, etc.

Lattice-Boltzmann simulations of the drag force on a sphere approaching a superhydrophobic striped plane.

By means of lattice-Boltzmann simulations the drag force on a sphere of radius R approaching a superhydrophobic striped wall has been investigated as a function of arbitrary separation h. Superhydrophobic (perfect-slip vs. no-slip) stripes are characterized by a texture period L and a fraction of the gas area ϕ.

Computer simulations reveal complex distribution of haemodynamic forces in a mouse retina model of angiogenesis.

There is currently limited understanding of the role played by haemodynamic forces on the processes governing vascular development. One of many obstacles to be overcome is being able to measure those forces, at the required resolution level, on vessels only a few micrometres thick. In this paper, we present an in silico method for the computation of the haemodynamic forces experienced by murine retinal vasculature (a widely used vascular development animal model) beyond what is measurable experimentally.

Flow past superhydrophobic surfaces with cosine variation in local slip length.

Anisotropic superhydrophobic surfaces have the potential to greatly reduce drag and enhance mixing phenomena in microfluidic devices. Recent work has focused mostly on cases of superhydrophobic stripes. Here, we analyze a relevant situation of cosine variation of the local slip length.

Tensorial slip of superhydrophobic channels.

We describe a generalization of the tensorial slip boundary condition, originally justified for a thick (compared to texture period) channel, to any channel thickness. The eigenvalues of the effective slip-length tensor, however, in general case become dependent on the gap and cannot be viewed as a local property of the surface, being a global characteristic of the channel. To illustrate the use of the tensor formalism we develop a semianalytical theory of an effective slip in a parallel-plate channel with one superhydrophobic striped and one hydrophilic surface.