ArticlePLoS computational biology2019
Red blood cells stabilize flow in brain microvascular networks.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loss of cerebral autoregulation drives abnormal perfusion patterns after stroke.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The way of life: The network challenge of blood flow in the brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Microvascular architecture and physiological fluctuations constrain the control of cerebral microcirculation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Impaired capillary-venous drainage contributes to gliosis and demyelination in mouse white matter during aging.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Associations between preoperative cerebral white matter microstructural changes and neurodevelopmental deficits in CHD infants: a diffusion tensor imaging study.Italian journal of pediatrics · 2025Article
- Relation between hematocrit partitioning and red blood cell lingering in a microfluidic network.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Ionic Liquid Coating-Driven Nanoparticle Delivery to the Brain: Applications for NeuroHIV.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Partitioning of dense RBC suspensions in single microfluidic bifurcations: role of cell deformability and bifurcation angle.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Glomerular microcirculation: Implications for diabetes, preeclampsia, and kidney injury.Acta physiologica (Oxford, England) · 2023Review
- The role of leptomeningeal collaterals in redistributing blood flow during stroke.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- A three-dimensional method for morphological analysis and flow velocity estimation in microvasculature on-a-chip.Bioengineering & translational medicine · 2023Article
- Stretch-activated ion channel TMEM63B associates with developmental and epileptic encephalopathies and progressive neurodegeneration.American journal of human genetics · 2023Article
- Capillary responses to functional and pathological activations rely on the capillary states at rest.Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism : official journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism · 2023Article
- Ionic Liquid Coating-Driven Nanoparticle Delivery to the Brain: Applications for NeuroHIV.Research square · 2023Article
- Understanding human aging and the fundamental cell signaling link in age-related diseases: the middle-aging hypovascularity hypoxia hypothesis.Frontiers in aging · 2023Article
- Spatiotemporal analysis of blood plasma and blood cell flow fluctuations of cerebral microcirculation in anesthetized rats.Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism : official journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism · 2023Article
- Image-based angio-adaptation modelling: a playground to study cerebrovascular development.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Red blood cell dynamics in extravascular biological tissues modelled as canonical disordered porous media.Interface focus · 2022Article
- Neurovascular coupling: motive unknown.Trends in neurosciences · 2022Review
- Pericyte remodeling is deficient in the aged brain and contributes to impaired capillary flow and structure.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Capillaries are the prime location for oxygen and nutrient exchange in all tissues. Despite their fundamental role, our knowledge of perfusion and flow regulation in cortical capillary beds is still limited. Here, we use in vivo measurements and blood flow simulations in anatomically accurate microvascular network to investigate the impact of red blood cells (RBCs) on microvascular flow. Based on these in vivo and in silico experiments, we show that the impact of RBCs leads to a bias toward equating the values of the outflow velocities at divergent capillary bifurcations, for which we coin the term "well-balanced bifurcations". Our simulation results further reveal that hematocrit heterogeneity is directly caused by the RBC dynamics, i.e. by their unequal partitioning at bifurcations and their effect on vessel resistance. These results provide the first in vivo evidence of the impact of RBC dynamics on the flow field in the cortical microvasculature. By structural and functional analyses of our blood flow simulations we show that capillary diameter changes locally alter flow and RBC distribution. A dilation of 10% along a vessel length of 100 μm increases the flow on average by 21% in the dilated vessel downstream a well-balanced bifurcation. The number of RBCs rises on average by 27%. Importantly, RBC up-regulation proves to be more effective the more balanced the outflow velocities at the upstream bifurcation are. Taken together, we conclude that diameter changes at capillary level bear potential to locally change the flow field and the RBC distribution. Moreover, our results suggest that the balancing of outflow velocities contributes to the robustness of perfusion. Based on our in silico results, we anticipate that the bi-phasic nature of blood and small-scale regulations are essential for a well-adjusted oxygen and energy substrate supply.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.