How Blood Gets to Where It's Needed: Mathematical Modeling of Cardiovascular Regulation
Abstract:
On a daily basis, we experience our cardiovascular system continuously adapting to our environment, whether it be due to exercise, stress, or standing up too quickly. Cardiovascular regulation is driven by complex control mechanisms acting in concert at both systemic (such as neurohormonal control) and organ levels (such as local autoregulation) to dynamically govern tissue perfusion. However, our understanding of cardiovascular regulation remains largely phenomenological due to the challenges associated with unraveling the systemic and local control mechanisms operating simultaneously across vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Our research group aims to provide a better quantitative understanding of cardiovascular regulation by leveraging state-of-the-art animal models to develop novel mathematical models.

In this seminar, I will first present our work on modeling dynamic cardiovascular adaptations during varying degrees of hemorrhage. We developed a closed-loop, lumped-parameter model to simulate both systemic and organ-specific control mechanisms that compensate for blood loss and redistribute blood flow towards vital organs (e.g., the brain). I will then discuss our efforts to develop a microstructurally motivated model of autoregulation in the coronary circulation, which integrates principles of coronary physiology into a vascular biomechanical framework. We show how a microstructurally motivated model can be used to investigate coronary circulation autoregulation in both health and disease. Collectively, this seminar will demonstrate how mathematical modeling deepens our understanding of cardiovascular physiology and pathophysiology, and how it can be leveraged to engineer next-generation treatment strategies..
Bio:
Matthew Eden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Computational Vascular Biomechanics Laboratory within the University of Michigan’s Department of Surgery, Section of Vascular Surgery. His research focuses on developing multi-scale physiological models of cardiovascular hemodynamics and regulation, including coronary autoregulation and hemodynamic responses to hemorrhage. He earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Northeastern University, where he leveraged experiments and computation to investigate the cardiopulmonary health consequences of inhaling wildfire smoke and e-cigarette aerosols. He holds B.S. degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.