A Method for Modeling Oxygen Diffusion in an Agent-based Model with Application to Host-Pathogen Infection

C. L. Sershen, S. J. Plimpton, E. E. May, EMBC'14 Conference (36th Annual Intl Conf of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society), Chicago, IL, Aug 2014.

This paper describes a method for incorporating a diffusion field modeling oxygen usage and dispersion in a multi-scale model of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection mediated granuloma formation. We implemented this method over a floating-point field to model oxygen dynamics in host tissue during chronic phase response and Mtb persistence. The method avoids the requirement of satisfying the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) condition, which is necessary in implementing the explicit version of the finite-difference method, but imposes an impractical bound on the time step. Instead, diffusion is modeled by a matrixbased, steady state approximate solution to the diffusion equation. Presented in figure 1 is the evolution of the diffusion profiles of a containment granuloma over time.

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