Techniques towards understanding shear dependent thrombus formation

Several novel techniques are presented to provide both a qualitative and quantitative method of analysing shear dependent thrombus growth in real-time. Thrombus geometries are grown (in vitro) and imaged through four-dimensional (4D) confocal microscopy. Techniques to reconstruct a time corrected stack of confocal images into a three-dimensional (3D) surface are presented. The flow of blood (in silico) over the thrombus geometry is modelled by attaining a solution to the incompressible and steady state Navier-Stokes equations through the OpenFOAM package. Previous work [5] has shown thrombus growth and platelet activation is highly sensitive to shear. As such the methods presented allow for the shear forces which platelets undergo prior to adhesion to be correlated with a range of parameters, including growth. The combination of these techniques allow for highly temporally and spatially resolved comparisons to be made as to the underlying mechanisms of platelet adhesion and aggregation