Wang Yue-Ping, Cheng Rui-Hao, He Ying, Mu Li-Zhong
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Jan 28;9:786615. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2021.786615. eCollection 2021.
Microvascular and Macrovascular diseases are serious complications of diabetic mellitus, which significantly affect the life quality of diabetic patients. Quantitative description of the relationship between temperature and blood flow is considerably important for non-invasive detection of blood vessel structural and functional lesions. In this study, thermal analysis has been employed to predict blood flow alterations in a foot and a cubic skin model successively by using a discrete vessel-porous media model and further compared the blood flows in 31 diabetic patients. The tissue is regarded as porous media whose liquid phase represents the blood flow in capillaries and solid phase refers to the tissue part. Discrete vascular segments composed of arteries, arterioles, veins, and venules were embedded in the foot model. In the foot thermal analysis, the temperature distributions with different inlet vascular stenosis were simulated. The local temperature area sensitive to the reduction of perfusion was obtained under different inlet blood flow conditions. The discrete vascular-porous media model was further applied in the assessment of the skin blood flow by coupling the measured skin temperatures of diabetic patients and an inverse method. In comparison with the estimated blood flows among the diabetic patients, delayed blood flow regulation was found in some of diabetic patients, implying that there may be some vascular disorders in these patients. The conclusion confirms the one in our previous experiment on diabetic rats. Most of the patients predicted to be with vascular disorders were diagnosed as vascular complication in clinical settings as well, suggesting the potential applications of the vascular-porous media model in health management of diabetic patients.
微血管和大血管疾病是糖尿病的严重并发症，显著影响糖尿病患者的生活质量。定量描述温度与血流之间的关系对于无创检测血管结构和功能病变非常重要。在本研究中，通过使用离散血管-多孔介质模型，先后采用热分析预测足部和立方皮肤模型中的血流变化，并进一步比较了31例糖尿病患者的血流情况。组织被视为多孔介质，其液相代表毛细血管中的血流，固相代表组织部分。由动脉、小动脉、静脉和小静脉组成的离散血管段被嵌入足部模型中。在足部热分析中，模拟了不同入口血管狭窄情况下的温度分布。在不同入口血流条件下，获得了对灌注减少敏感的局部温度区域。通过将糖尿病患者的测量皮肤温度与反演方法相结合，离散血管-多孔介质模型进一步应用于皮肤血流评估。与糖尿病患者之间估计的血流相比，发现一些糖尿病患者存在血流调节延迟，这意味着这些患者可能存在一些血管紊乱。该结论证实了我们之前在糖尿病大鼠实验中的结论。大多数预计存在血管紊乱的患者在临床环境中也被诊断为血管并发症，这表明血管-多孔介质模型在糖尿病患者健康管理中的潜在应用。
