Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7178825 Mechanics Research Communications 2015 9 Pages PDF
Abstract
The aim of this article is to propose a simple way of describing a tumour as a linear elastic material from a reference configuration that is continuously evolving in time due to growth and remodelling. The main assumption allowing this simplification is that the tumour mass is a very ductile material, so that it can only sustain moderate stresses while the deformation induced by growth, that can actually be quite big, mainly induces a plastic reorganisation of malignant cells. In mathematical terms this means that the deformation gradient can be split into a volumetric growth term, a term describing the reorganisation of cells, and a term that can be approximated by means of the linear strain tensor. A dimensional analysis of the importance of the different terms also allows to introduce a second simplification consisting of decoupling the equations describing the growth of the tumour mass from those describing the flow of the interstitial fluid.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Engineering Mechanical Engineering
Authors
, , ,