Morphoelastic Models for Contraction of Burn Injuries
Daan Smits
Supervisor TU Delft: Fred Vermolen
start of the project: October 2018
The Master project has been finished in September 2019
by the completion of the
Masters Thesis
and a final
presentation
has been given.
For working address etc. we refer to our
alumnipage.
Summary of the master project:
Severe burn injuries are often characterised by the occurrence of
contractures and/or hypertrophic
scars. Skin contraction takes place as a result of skin cells
(fibroblasts) that pull on their
surroundings by which the skin locally contracts. If the fibroblasts
disappear as a result of
programmed cell death (apoptosis), then the skin should be reshaped
back to the initial state. If
this does not happen, then, the contraction is permanent, which can
cause loss of mobility to the
patient. A permanent contraction that causes loss of mobility is
commonly referred to as a
contracture.
Standard (linear) elasticity models cannot be used to model permanent
shape changes of tissue.
Therefore, we are going to use morphoelasticity, which is an approach
that is commonly used to
model growth of materials, such as tissues. Possible applications are
modelling permanent wound
contraction (Koppenol & Vermolen, Hall) or growth of organs (Gorieli),
or tumor development.
In this study, we will look at numerical methods for morphoelasticity,
as well as a mathematical
analysis of the model equations. Our objective is to use the developed
mathematical insights to
improve the current modelling framework for simulating burn injuries
using a morphoelastic
formalism.
Contact information:
Kees
Vuik
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