Multiscale mechano-morphology of soft tissues : a computational study with applications to cancer diagnosis and treatment

Abstract

Cooperation of engineering and biomedical sciences has produced significant advances in healthcare technology. In particular, computational modelling has led to a faster development and improvement of diagnostic and treatment techniques since it allows exploring multiple scenarios without additional complexity and cost associated to the traditional trial-and-error methodologies. The goal of this thesis is to propose computational methodologies to analyse how the changes in the microstructure of soft tissues, caused by different pathological conditions, influence the mechanical properties at higher length scales and, more importantly, to detect such changes for the purpose of quantitative diagnosis and treatment of such pathologies in the scenario of drug delivery. To achieve this objective different techniques based on quasi-static and dynamic probing have been established to perform quantitative tissue diagnosis at the microscopic (tissue) and macroscopic (organ) scales. The effects of pathologies not only affect the mechanical properties of tissue (e.g. elasticity and viscoelasticity), but also the transport properties (e.g. diffusivity) in the case of drug delivery. Such transport properties are further considered for a novel multi-scale, patient-specific framework to predict the efficacy of chemotherapy in soft tissues. It is hoped that this work will pave the road towards non-invasive palpation techniques for early diagnosis and optimised drug delivery strategies to improve the life quality of patients