The Role of the Vasculature in Metastasis
The vascular system plays a central role in the metastatic spread of cancer. Beyond supplying oxygen and nutrients to the primary tumor, blood vessels provide the pathways through which circulating tumor cells (CTCs) disseminate to distant organs. Throughout the metastatic cascade, cancer cells continuously interact with the vascular microenvironment, where blood flow, vessel morphology, and biomechanical forces influence their transport, arrest, and eventual colonization of secondary tissues.
Metastasis is a multistep process:
- Tumor growth and angiogenesis – The primary tumor stimulates the formation of new blood vessels, supplying nutrients while creating access to the circulation.
- Invasion and intravasation – Cancer cells acquire invasive characteristics and enter nearby blood vessels, becoming circulating tumor cells (CTCs).
- Circulation – CTCs travel through the vascular network, where they are exposed to blood flow, vessel geometry, and interactions with blood cells and the vessel wall.
- Vascular arrest and extravasation – CTCs become trapped within small vessels and exit the circulation through mechanisms such as perivascular migration, mosaic migration, or transcellular migration.
- Colonization – After entering the surrounding tissue, cancer cells survive, proliferate, and establish secondary tumors.
Research related projects/areas
Patient-specific vascular networks can be extracted from clinical imaging modalities such as Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA). However, due to the limited spatial resolution of medical imaging, the extracted vasculature is often incomplete, containing disconnected vessel segments and missing portions of the microvascular network. These limitations restrict their direct use for computational modeling and blood flow simulations.
To address this challenge, Shen et al. developed a mathematical reconstruction framework that combines image-derived vessel segmentation with Global Constructive Optimization (GCO) to generate complete, patient-specific vascular networks. Starting from the major vessels visible in clinical images, the framework reconstructs the missing vascular branches according to physiological optimality principles, producing anatomically realistic networks that preserve the patient's vascular anatomy while enabling computational fluid dynamics and metastasis simulations.
J. Shen, A. H. Faruqi, Y. Jiang, and N. Maftoon, “Mathematical Reconstruction of Patient-Specific Vascular Networks Based on Clinical Images and Global Optimization,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 20648–20661, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3052501.