Seminar “A Story of Two Circulations: Blood Flow and Transport in the Human Placenta”
11 March at 16:30 MSK
Topic: A Story of Two Circulations: Blood Flow and Transport in the Human Placenta
The human placenta is a unique multi-functional organ. It is a life-support system that not only nourishes a growing fetus, but also determines his or her life-long health. The placental primary exchange units, terminal villi, host complex networks of fetal capillaries and are interfaced with maternal blood, percolating a disordered porous medium. While placental transport at the micro-scale can be described by established models, systematically upscaling the transport and quantifying the associated uncertainty at the organ-level remain open challenges [1]. This talk will summarise recent progress in advanced 3D microscopy and its assimilation into mathematical models that predict placental function [2]. The models reveal a surprising role of microstructure in the upscaled predictions and demonstrate certain universality of reduced-order approximations for a wide class of solutes [3]. The developed approaches could also be useful for quantifying solute exchange in other complex microvascular systems.
References
- Jensen O.E. & Chernyavsky I.L. (2019) Annu Rev Fluid Mech 51:25 (doi.org/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010518-040219).
- Tun W.M., et al. (2020) bioRxiv 2020.12.07.411462 (doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.07.411462).
- Erlich A., et al. (2019) Sci Adv 5:eaav6326 (doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav6326).
Speaker
Igor L. Chernyavsky, PhD, Research Fellow of Department of Mathematics; Maternal & Fetal Health Research Centre, University of Manchester, UK.