Microvessel Chaste: An Open Library for Spatial Modelling of Vascularized Tissues

Spatial models of vascularized tissues are widely used in computational physiology. We introduce a new software library for composing multiscale, multiphysics models for applications including tumour growth, angiogenesis, osteogenesis, coronary perfusion and oxygen delivery. Composition of such models is time-consuming, with many researchers writing custom software. Recent advances in imaging have produced detailed three-dimensional (3D) datasets of vascularized tissues at the scale of individual cells. To fully exploit such data there is an increasing need for software that allows user-friendly composition of efficient, 3D models of vascularized tissues, and comparison of predictions with in vivo or in vitro experiments and alternative computational formulations. Microvessel Chaste can be used to build simulations of vessel growth and adaptation in response to mechanical and chemical stimuli, intra- and extra-vascular transport of nutrient, growth factor and drugs, and cell proliferation in complex 3D geometries. In addition, it can be used to develop custom software for integrating modelling with experimental data processing workflows, facilitated by a comprehensive Python interface to solvers implemented in C++. Microvessel Chaste is available under an open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence at https://jmsgrogan.github.io/MicrovesselChaste. This article links to two reproducible example problems, showing how the library can be used to build simulations of tumour growth and angiogenesis with realistic vessel networks.