Blog

The increasing rates of cerebrovascular diseases, such as stroke and dementia, mean that understanding cerebral blood flow and its control in both healthy and diseased states has become an important clinical problem. However this is made challenging by the spatial and temporal limitations of human brain imaging and the number of blood vessels involved in a what is a highly complex dynamic regulating system over many length scales. In this talk I will discuss the work that we have done to construct models of cerebral blood flow that cover the many length scales involved, running from a few micrometres to a few millimetres. I will show how we have developed such models from the bottom up, through highly detailed modelling of the microcirculation and the application of homogenisation and optimisation methods, in order to generate a full-brain model of blood flow and oxygen transport. I will then talk about how this can be applied (and validated) in pathological conditions, in particular the treatment of acute ischaemic stroke. I will conclude by discussing how we next plan to use multiple time scales in the context of chronic diseases such as dementia and to quantify the effects of interventions such as sleep and exercise on disease progression.