Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA.
There is an increasing need for quantitative and computationally affordable models for analyzing tissue metabolism and hemodynamics in microvascular networks. In this work, we develop a hybrid model to solve for the time-varying oxygen advection-diffusion equation in the vessels and tissue. To obtain a three-dimensional temporal evolution of tissue oxygen concentration for realistic complex vessel networks, we used a graph-based advection model combined with a finite-element based diffusion model and an implicit time-advancing scheme. We validated this algorithm for both static and dynamic conditions. We also applied it to a complex vascular network obtained from a rodent somatosensory cortex. Qualitative agreement was found with in-vivo experiments.