A lumped model of lymphatic systems suitable for large scale simulations

Even though the importance of the lymphatic System in the active regulation of body fluid balance, in the immune system and in cancer dissemination is well known, large scale models of its behaviour are still lacking. Specifically, while several distributed and lumped models of single elements of the lymphatic system have been proposed, models that can be used as subsystems to describe behaviour of large lymphatic networks using general purpose simulators are not yet available. In this paper we propose a lumped model, based on data available in current literature, that is implemented using standard mixed mode circuit representation syntax. This allows to build large and complex lymphatic networks and simulate their transient and steady state behaviour. The model presented in this paper is limited to the element known as lymphangion that is one of the main components in lymph transport. Since we do not have yet data regarding larger networks, we will limit for the time being our discussion to a short chain of lymphangions.