Effect of fractional blood flow on plasma skimming in the microvasculature

Abstract

Although redistribution of red blood cells at bifurcated vessels is highly dependent on flow rate, it is still challenging to quantitatively express the dependency of flow rate in plasma skimming due to nonlinear cellular interactions. We suggest a plasma skimming model that can involve the effect of fractional blood flow at each bifurcation point. For validating the new model, it is compared with \textit{in vivo} data at single bifurcation points, as well as microvascular network systems. In the simulation results, the exponential decay of plasma skimming parameter, $M$, along fractional flow rate shows the best performance in both cases.