Alexandra K. Diem

Simula Research Laboratory · Department of Computational Physiology

Finite-differences methods such as the Lax-Wendroff method (LW) are commonly used to solve 1D models of blood flow. These models solve for blood flow and lumen area and are useful in disease research, such as hypertension and atherosclerosis, where flow and pressure are good indicators for the presence of disease. Despite the popularity of the LW m...

The accumulation of soluble and insoluble amyloid-beta (A-beta) in the brain indicates failure of elimination of A-beta from the brain with age and Alzheimer's disease. There is a variety of mechanisms for elimination of A-beta from the brain. They include the action of microglia and enzymes together with receptor-mediated absorption of A-beta into...

Perfusion is one of the most important processes maintaining organ health. From a computational perspective, however, perfusion is amongst the least studied physiological processes of the heart. The recent development of novel nanoparticle-based targeted cardiac therapy calls for novel simulation methods that can provide insights into the distribut...

The mechanisms behind the clearance of soluble waste from deep within the parenchyma of the brain remain unclear. Experimental evidence reveals that one pathway for clearance of waste, termed intra-mural peri-arterial drainage (IPAD), is the rapid drainage of interstitial fluid along basement membranes (BM) of the smooth muscle cells of cerebral ar...

Chemical Signalling in the Neurovascular Unit This is a replication of the following article: Witthoft A, Karniadakis GE (2012) A bidirectional model for communication in the neurovascular unit. Journal of Theoretical Biology 311: 80-93. where the authors present "an interactional model of bidirectional signalling in the neurovascular unit". Thi...

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and to date there is no cure or efficient prophylaxis. The cognitive decline correlates with the accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) in the walls of capillaries and arteries. Our group has demonstrated that interstitial fluid and Aβ are eliminated from the brain along the basement membranes of...

Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results, however computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. Jam...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) in the brain and in the walls of cerebral arteries. The focus of this work is on clearance of Aβ along artery walls, the failure of which may explain the accumulation of Aβ in Alzheimer's disease. Periarterial basement membranes form continuous channels from cerebral capillaries...

Here we review and extend models on different scales for a computing architecture made from networks of excitable chemical droplets. A system of lipid covered droplets containing reagents of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction has been used in our experiments as model system to study the signal transmission dynamics of chemical computers and the...