Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 14: Poster Session I
BP 14.9: Poster
Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 10:00–12:30, P3
Leveraging Experimental Vasculature Data for High Resolution Brain Tumor Simulations — •Eric Behle1, Julian Herold2, and Alexander Schug1 — 1NIC Research Group Computational Structural Biology, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Jülich Research Center, Jülich, Germany — 2Steinbuch Centre for Computing, KIT, Karlsruhe
Cancer remains a leading cause of mortality. Multidisciplinary studies probe its pathology to increase treatment options. Computational modeling of tumors on HPC resources offers insight into its progress and an avenue for advancing our understanding. However, initialization and parameterization of the underlying models require high-resolution data from real tissue structures. Here, we leveraged HPC resources and a massive dataset of a mouse brain's entire vascular network. We processed these image stacks into detailed 3D representations, identified brain regions of interest, and conducted a series of large-scale simulations to investigate how tumor growth is influenced by local vascular network characteristics. By simulating tumor growth with sub-cellular resolution, we can probe to which extent vessel density and network length influence growth. We determined that vessel density is the primary determinant of growth rate. Finally, our results allowed us to extrapolate tumor cell growth predictions for the entire mouse brain, highlighting the critical role of vascular topology in tumor progression. Such increasingly realistic simulations of cancer cells may enable researchers to bridge the gap between basic biology and clinical practice, supporting development of cancer therapies.
Keywords: Tumor simulations; mouse brain; vasculature