Could "chaos" hold the key to understanding cardiovascular health?
Chaos is everywhere. It shapes weather patterns, ecosystems and even the movement of traffic on our roads.
But chaos may also be lurking inside of our own bodies, impacting human health and wellness.
ǰDebanjan Mukherjee, an assistant professor in thePaul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, that possibility raises an intriguing question: what role does chaos play in the way blood flows through our arteries and veins?
Backed by a new five-year, $2.05 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Mukherjee and his team in the are working to tackle that mystery.
The funding, as part of the institute’s Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) program, will help the group explore new ways to identify and measure chaotic blood flow and whether they could hold important clues about cardiovascular health and disease.
“There is an elegance and complexity in the way blood flows within the human body. So many instances arise where fluids flow non-linearly in ways that are not wellunderstood and those non-linearities can lead to chaos,” said Mukherjee, who is also affiliated with theBiomedical Engineering Program (BME) and theBioFrontiers Institute. “Is there chaos? And if so, how do we describe it? Is it keeping us healthy or is it detrimental?
“These are the questions we are trying to answer as part of this research.”
The butterfly effect
According to Mukherjee, the project draws inspiration from a theory called the butterfly effect.
The concept, discovered in the 1960s by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz during a series of computer weather simulations, describes an idea that seemingly small, insignificant disturbances in systems can be related to large changes over time. How even something as simple as the gentle flutter of a butterfly’s wings can influence weather patterns on the other side of the world.
Mukherjee believes a similar principle could be taking place inside of our own bodies.
“Fluid movement plays two distinct roles. The first is mixing up materials and transporting them to different locations. The second is applying some kind of force to the cells lining the blood vessel,” Mukherjee said. “Our goal is to analyze these two physiological contexts and one day create tools to help us quantify and work with chaos in the body.”
To do this, Mukherjee and his team will be utilizing the—an original, open-source tool developed in their lab. The program allows them to create complex computer models that assemble flow networks, particles and biochemicalfactors into one multi-physics simulation.
They are also planning to work with cellular biology scientists and clinical collaborators at CU Anschutz andChildren’s Hospital Colorado for imaging and experiments.
If done well, Mukherjee says the project’s impact could be staggering.
“Maybe one day we could improve targeted drug delivery systems because we have a better understanding exactly how fluid is mixing. Or maybe we find ways to recognize the formation of diseases earlier based on a cell’s response to fluid forces,” said Mukherjee. “This is a very fundamental topic with critical implications on real physiological systems.”
He also believes the work can be applied to other areas of the body outside of just the circulatory system.
“The respiratory system could be a great place for this research. The digestive system also has quite a bit of mixing going on at all times that remains unclear. Maybe our work can provide some inputs that link to those processes,” Mukherjee said. “Anywhere there is fluid flow in the human body, and mixing or cellular stresses are involved, we can think about this concept.”