Modeling molecular signals in pulsating blood flow for healthcare
Analytical Modeling of Open- and Closed-Loop Dispersive Molecular Communication Channels with Pulsatile Flow
Emerging Technologies
Summary
Molecules can communicate information inside the body by traveling through blood vessels, but blood flow isn’t steady—it pulses with each heartbeat. The authors created a mathematical model that predicts how molecules spread in blood vessels when flow pulses, combining movement from both diffusion and flow. They tested their model with computer simulations and introduced a way to tell when simpler models work well depending on vessel and flow conditions. Their work helps better understand how molecular communication behaves in realistic blood vessel environments.
What this means in practice
- •For biomedical engineers: Design molecular communication systems for drug delivery within pulsating blood vessels using accurate analytical channel models.
- •For medical device developers: Improve performance prediction of devices relying on molecular signals in blood flow by incorporating pulsatile effects into transport models.
Authors
Theofilos Symeonidis, Fardad Vakilipoor, Timo Jakumeit, Robert Schober, Nunzio Tuccitto, Maximilian Schäfer
Abstract
Molecular communication (MC) is a communication paradigm in which information is conveyed through the release, propagation, and reception of molecules. Many envisioned healthcare applications of MC are expected to operate inside the human body, where the cardiovascular system (CVS) may serve as the physical propagation environment and molecular transport is governed by diffusion and blood flow. Although blood flow is inherently pulsatile, most analytical MC channel models assume steady flow. In this paper, we develop a time-variant analytical model for dispersive MC channels with pulsatile flow. We derive the straight-duct response as a Normal distribution with time-variant mean and variance, capturing the combined effects of diffusion and pulsatile flow, and extend it to closed-loop channels through a wrapped-Normal representation. The model is validated against three-dimensional (3D) particle-based simulations (PBSs) for synthetic and physiologically motivated velocity waveforms. We further derive a closed-form first-order approximation for the first-arrival peak time and introduce the nondimensional indicator $S_{\mathrm{Rx}}$ for assessing the applicability of the reduced one-dimensional (1D) model. Our results show that pulsatility has the strongest influence when molecular transport is predominantly advective and the temporal flow variations are not averaged out, whereas stronger diffusion and faster pulsations reduce its impact on the received signal. Moreover, a PBS-based parameter sweep supports $S_{\mathrm{Rx}} \ge 2$ as a practical criterion for the applicability of the proposed analytical model. Finally, relating the analytical assumptions to representative blood-vessel classes shows that model applicability depends not only on the transport conditions but also on physiological properties such as vessel rigidity, geometric uniformity, and blood rheology.