Effective Diffusion and Tortuosity in Brain White Matter

Patients affected by glioblastomas have a very low survival rate. Emerging techniques, such as convection enhanced delivery (CED), need complex numerical models to be effective; furthermore, the estimation of the main parameters to be used to instruct constitutive laws in simulations represents a major challenge. This work proposes a new method to compute tortuosity, a key parameter for drug diffusion in fibrous tissue, starting from a model which incorporates the main white matter geometrical features. It is shown that tortuosity increases from 1.35 to 1.85 as the extracellular space width decreases. The results are in good agreement with experimental data reported in the literature.