Computational Modeling of Blood Clotting: 
                  Platelet Aggregation and Coagulation

                                   by

                              Aaron Fogelson 
             Department of Mathematics, University of Utah   

                INSCC 110, 3:30pm Monday, March 1, 1999

                                Abstract

Thrombosis, which is the formation of blood clots within
vessels of the circulatory system, is the proximal cause of most
heart attacks and of other severe cardiovascular problems such as
ischemia and angina.  The two main components of the thrombotic process
are platelet aggregation and coagulation.  Platelet aggregation
involves processes of cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesion and cell
signalling and response all within the moving blood.  Coagulation involves a
network of enzyme reactions with numerous feedforward and
feedback loops, presumably for the dual purposes of control and
amplification of the initial stimulus.  Another important feature of the
coagulation system is that many of the important reactions occur on surfaces,
not in the bulk fluid of the blood, while transport of the participating
enzymes and their substrates occurs by advection and diffusion in
the fluid.  In this talk we will describe our long-term efforts to
model platelet aggregation with emphasis on new developments, we will
discuss our recent work to model important aspects of coagulation, and
we will outline our plans for how to combine these two efforts
into a more comprehensive model of thrombosis.



Requests for preprints and reprints send to 
                         Aaron Fogelson <fogelson@math.utah.edu>  
This source can be found at http://www.math.utah.edu/research/