A Physics-Informed Neural Network Approach to Multiphysics Continuum Modeling of Cancer Growth via Chemo-fluid Coupling

Abstract

Tumor progression is an inherently multiphysical phenomenon in which interstitial fluid dynamics, biochemical transport, and cellular mechanics interact across multiple spatiotemporal scales. Classical mesh-based solvers, although accurate, impose prohibitive computational costs for the repeated evaluations demanded by inverse parameter identification and future patient-specific predictive pipelines. In this work we introduce a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework for a tractable chemo-fluidic continuum model of tumor growth that couples an advection-diffusion-reaction (ADR) equation for the tumor volume fraction with a quasi-static Darcy pressure equation for the interstitial fluid pressure. By intentionally decoupling the solid-mechanical equilibrium, we obtain a three-equation system whose gradient structure is stable under automatic differentiation, enabling robust deep-learning optimization. The network simultaneously learns both state variables from physics constraints alone (forward problem) and recovers hidden transport parameters from sparse, noisy synthetic measurements (Data-Assimilation PINN, DA-PINN, inverse problem). We verify the forward solver against a high-resolution finite-difference (FD) reference, achieving a mean absolute error below 0.002. For the inverse problem, starting from an initial permeability estimate of 0.08 (a factor of 4x above the true value of 0.02) with only 5% spatially sparse observations corrupted by 5% Gaussian noise, the DA-PINN recovers the permeability with a relative error below 5%. These results demonstrate that physics-informed deep learning constitutes a viable, computationally efficient route to multiphysics oncology modeling and lays the mathematical groundwork for future integration into clinical data assimilation pipelines.