The Margination of Particles in Areas of Constricted Blood Flow

Stroke is a leading cause of death globally and is caused by stenoses, abnormal narrowings of blood vessels. Recently, there has been an increased interest in shear-activated particle clusters for the treatment of stenosis, but there is a lack of literature investigating the impact of different stenosis geometries on particle margination. Margination refers to the movement of particles toward the blood vessel wall and is desirable for drug delivery. The current study investigated ten different geometries and their effects on margination. Microfluidic devices with a constricted area were fabricated to mimic a stenosed blood vessel with different extent of occlusion, constricted length, and eccentricity (gradualness of the constriction and expansion). Spherical fluorescent particles with a diameter of 2.11 μm were suspended in blood and tracked as they moved into, through, and out of the constricted area. A margination parameter, M, was used to quantify margination based on the particle distribution after velocity normalization. Experimental results suggested that a constriction leads to an enhanced margination, whereas an expansion is responsible for a decrease in margination. Further, margination was found to increase with increasing percent occlusion and constriction length, likely a result of higher shear rate and longer residence time, respectively. Margination decreases as the stenosis geometry becomes more gradual (eccentricity increases) with the exception of a sudden constriction/expansion geometry. The findings demonstrate the importance of geometric effects on margination and call for detailed numerical modeling and geometric characterization of the stenosed areas to fully understand the underlying physics.

Lattice Boltzmann Simulation of Healthy and Defective Red Blood Cell Settling in Blood Plasma

In this paper, an attempt has been made to study sedimentation of a red blood cell (RBC) in a plasma-filled tube numerically. Such behaviors are studied for a healthy and a defective cell which might be created due to human diseases, such as diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, and hereditary spherocytosis. Flow-induced deformation of RBC is obtained using finite-element method (FEM), while flow and fluid-membrane interaction are handled using lattice Boltzmann (LB) and immersed boundary methods (IBMs), respectively. The effects of RBC properties as well as its geometry and orientation on its sedimentation rate are investigated and discussed. The results show that decreasing frontal area of an RBC and/or increasing tube diameter results in a faster settling. Comparison of healthy and diabetic cells reveals that less cell deformability leads to slower settling. The simulation results show that the sicklelike and spherelike RBCs have lower settling velocity as compared with a biconcave discoid cell.