Computationally tractable mechanistic model of inhomogeneous -- anisotropic drug diffusion and tumor ablation

In this work, we study the effect of drug distribution on tumor cell death when the drug is internally injected in the tumorous tissue. We derive a full 3-dimensional inhomogeneous – anisotropic diffusion model. To capture the anisotropic nature of the diffusion process in the model, we use an MRI data of a 35-year old patient diagnosed
with Glioblastoma multiform(GBM) which is the most common and most aggressive primary brain tumor. After preprocessing the data with a medical image processing software, we employ finite element method in MPI-based parallel setting to numerically simulate the full model and produce dose-response curves. We then illustrate the apoptosis (cell death) fractions in the tumor region over the course of simulation and proposed several ways to improve the drug efficacy. Our model also allows us to visually examine the toxicity. Since the model is built directly on the top of a patient-specific data, we hope that this study will contribute to the individualized cancer treatment efforts from a computational bio-mechanics viewpoint.