Modeling of Self Healing of Skin Tissue

Abstract

A suite of mathematical models for epidermal wound healing is presented. The models deal with the sequential steps of angiogenesis (neovascularization) and wound contraction (the actual healing of a wound). An innovation is the combination of the two processes which do not take place in a complete sequential manner but overlap partially. The models consist of nonlinearly coupled diffusion–reaction equations, in which transport of oxygen, growth factors, and cells, and mitosis are taken into account. Further, Adam’s alternative model, which is based on the assumption of the presence of an active layer at the wound edge, is described and some implications are presented. An important feature of the model due to Adam is that the wound edge is tracked explicitly as a part of the solution. In this work several numerical methods to solve the moving boundary problem are described.