黏附于血管壁表面的白细胞在稳定剪切流动下发生变形的生物力学模型

白细胞与血管表面的黏附是重要的生物医学工程问题，引起了学者们的广泛研究。我们用复合液滴来模拟黏附于血管表面的白细胞，根据二维计算流体动力方法研究了流体切应力作用下白细胞黏附引起的压力分布。同时，通过引入“变形指数”的概念，研究稳定剪切流动下白细胞变形的生物力学特性，数值结果表明：（1）随着初始接触角，毛细血管数，外界流场雷诺数的增大，细胞的变形也增大，而细胞浆比细胞核更易于变形，表明细胞核更能耐受切流动；（2）当切应力增大到一定值时，细胞不能进一步变形，变形指数达到峰值；（3）压力分布曲线表明，在细胞的下游形成一个高压区，提供促使细胞受力达到平衡的升力，从而阻止了细胞的进一步变形，我们关于细胞核变形的结果有助于理解白细胞如何将外界流体作用力（如切应力）等力学信号向核内转导的生物力学机理。

A Biomechanical Model for Simulating the Deformation of a Leukocyte Adhered to the Surface of a Blood Vessel under Steady Shear Flow

The adhesion of leukocytes to substrate is an important biomedical engineering problem and has drawn extensive research. In this study, we have proposed a compound drop model to simulate a leukocyte with a nucleus adhered to the surface of a blood vessel under steady shear flow. A two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is conducted to determine the local distribution of pressure on the surface of the adherent model cell. By introducing the parameter of deformation index (DI), we have investigated the deformation of the model cell and it's nucleus under controlled conditions. Our numerical results show that: (1)the model cell is capable of deformation with the increase of initial contact angle, capillary number, and Reynolds number, and that the cytoplasm is more deformable while the nucleus is more capable of resisting external imposed shear flow; (2)the model cell is not able to deform infinitely with the increase of external shear flow because the deformation index reaches a maximum; (3)pressure distribution confirms that there exists a region downstream of the cell, which produces high pressure to retard continuous deformation and provide a positive lift force on the cell. Our results of nucleus deformation may help to develop a better understanding of how leukocytes transduce external mechanical signal like shear stress into nucleus.