Structural Adaptation in Normal and Cancerous Vasculature.

The dynamics of cancerous tissue growth involves the complex interaction of a number of phenomena interacting over a range of temporal and spatial scales. While several processes involved have been studied, the adaptation of the vasculature within a growing tumour has thus far received little attention. We consider a hybrid cellular automaton model which analyses the interaction between the tumour vascular network and tissue growth. We compute the temporal behaviour of the cancerous cell population under different hypotheses of structural adaptation in the vasculature. This may provide a possible method of determining experimentally which adaptation mechanisms are at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]