Mathematics Graduate Student Colloquium

Stability predictions of tumor growth and evaluations against experimental observations

Kara Pham
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
4:00 pm - 4:50 pm
RH 114

Talk Abstract:

We consider three constitutive relations to describe tumor growth: Darcy's law, Stokes law, and the combined Darcy-Stokes law. Darcy's law is used to describe fluid flow in a porous medium. Stokes law describes the flow of a viscous fluid. In this talk, we will discuss using linear theories to study tumor shape stability (the ability of the tumor to return to being spherical or exhibit protrusions) described by the three physical relations and to evaluate the consistency between theoretical model predictions and experimental data. The motivation behind this work is that shape instabilities (growing protrusions) are associated with local invasiveness, which is often a precursor to tumor metastasis (infiltration of the distant organs). We will discuss the results and further show that it is feasible to extract parameter values from a limited set of data and create a self-consistent modeling framework that can be extended to the multiscale study of cancer. Numerical methods are used to simulate the nonlinear effects of stress on solid tumor growth and invasiveness.

About the Speaker:

Kara is in her sixth year and expects to graduate in June 2011. Her advisor is John Lowengrub, and her current projects involve studying tumor growth on the macroscale.

Advisor and Collaborators

John Lowengrub is currently Kara's advisor.

Supplementary Materials:

none

Refreshments:

Pizza will be served after the talk.

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