No Arabic abstract
In this work, we study the in-vitro dynamics of the most malignant form of the primary brain tumor: Glioblastoma Multiforme. Typically, the growing tumor consists of the inner dense proliferating zone and the outer less dense invasive region. Experiments with different types of cells show qualitatively different behavior. Wild-type cells invade a spherically symmetric manner, but mutant cells are organized in tenuous branches. We formulate a model for this sort of growth using two coupled reaction-diffusion equations for the cell and nutrient concentrations. When the ratio of the nutrient and cell diffusion coefficients exceeds some critical value, the plane propagating front becomes unstable with respect to transversal perturbations. The instability threshold and the full phase-plane diagram in the parameter space are determined. The results are in a good agreement with experimental findings for the two types of cells.
We propose a strange-attractor model of tumor growth and metastasis. It is a 4-dimensional spatio-temporal cancer model with strong nonlinear couplings. Even the same type of tumor is different in every patient both in size and appearance, as well as in temporal behavior. This is clearly a characteristic of dynamical systems sensitive to initial conditions. The new chaotic model of tumor growth and decay is biologically motivated. It has been developed as a live Mathematica demonstration, see Wolfram Demonstrator site: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ChaoticAttractorInTumorGrowth/ Key words: Reaction-diffusion tumor growth model, chaotic attractor, sensitive dependence on initial tumor characteristics
Prediction and control of cancer invasion is a vital problem in medical science. This paper proposes a modern geometric Ricci-flow and entropy based model for control of avascular multicellular tumor spheroid growth and decay. As a tumor growth/decay control tool, a monoclonal antibody therapy is proposed. Keywords: avascular tumor growth and decay, multicellular tumor spheroid, Ricci flow and entropy, nonlinear heat equation, monoclonal antibody cancer therapy
We investigate clustering of malignant glioma cells. emph{In vitro} experiments in collagen gels identified a cell line that formed clusters in a region of low cell density, whereas a very similar cell line (which lacks an important mutation) did not cluster significantly. We hypothesize that the mutation affects the strength of cell-cell adhesion. We investigate this effect in a new experiment, which follows the clustering dynamics of glioma cells on a surface. We interpret our results in terms of a stochastic model and identify two mechanisms of clustering. First, there is a critical value of the strength of adhesion; above the threshold, large clusters grow from a homogeneous suspension of cells; below it, the system remains homogeneous, similarly to the ordinary phase separation. Second, when cells form a cluster, we have evidence that they increase their proliferation rate. We have successfully reproduced the experimental findings and found that both mechanisms are crucial for cluster formation and growth.
The understanding of neural activity patterns is fundamentally linked to an understanding of how the brains network architecture shapes dynamical processes. Established approaches rely mostly on deviations of a given network from certain classes of random graphs. Hypotheses about the supposed role of prominent topological features (for instance, the roles of modularity, network motifs, or hierarchical network organization) are derived from these deviations. An alternative strategy could be to study deviations of network architectures from regular graphs (rings, lattices) and consider the implications of such deviations for self-organized dynamic patterns on the network. Following this strategy, we draw on the theory of spatiotemporal pattern formation and propose a novel perspective for analyzing dynamics on networks, by evaluating how the self-organized dynamics are confined by network architecture to a small set of permissible collective states. In particular, we discuss the role of prominent topological features of brain connectivity, such as hubs, modules and hierarchy, in shaping activity patterns. We illustrate the notion of network-guided pattern formation with numerical simulations and outline how it can facilitate the understanding of neural dynamics.
Inspired by biological dynamics, we consider a growth Markov process taking values on the space of rooted binary trees, similar to the Aldous-Shields model. Fix $nge 1$ and $beta>0$. We start at time 0 with the tree composed of a root only. At any time, each node with no descendants, independently from the other nodes, produces two successors at rate $beta(n-k)/n$, where $k$ is the distance from the node to the root. Denote by $Z_n(t)$ the number of nodes with no descendants at time $t$ and let $T_n = beta^{-1} n ln(n /ln 4) + (ln 2)/(2 beta)$. We prove that $2^{-n} Z_n(T_n + n tau)$, $tauinbb R$, converges to the Gompertz curve $exp (- (ln 2) e^{-beta tau})$. We also prove a central limit theorem for the martingale associated to $Z_n(t)$.