Blood flow and solute transfer in feto-placental capillary networks

Throughout the mammalian species, solute exchange takes place in
complex microvascular networks. In recent years, multi-scale models
have proved successful in investigating the structure-function
relationship of such networks in specific contexts. However, general
methods for incorporating experimental data on complex, heterogeneous
capillary networks into whole-organ multi-scale models remain
under-developed. Here we introduce a theoretical framework, tested
against image-based computations, for quantifying the transport
capacity of feto-placental capillary networks using experimental
data. We find that solute transfer can be described using a
near-universal physical scaling based on two non-dimensional
parameters (the diffusive capacity and a Damköhler number), which can
be extracted from microscopy images via standard computational and
image-analysis tools.