Abstract
Endothelial dysfunction is known to be an early sign of arteriosclerosis. The shear stress-induced endothelial nitric oxide (NO) production is an important function of vascular system. In order to analyze this function, many in vitro experiments have been conducted and computer simulations with the mathematical models are utilized to analyze the experimental data. However, it is difficult to understand the whole function because each model simulates only a particular behavior. In this paper, we developed a multi-scale model that consists of mechanical and physiological models. This model simulates the shear stress-induced intracellular ion movements and NO synthesis. The proposed model is also able to simulate the NO production under eNOS inhibitor L-NAME. We performed the numerical experiments and demonstrated that the proposed model is capable of reproducing the experimental data of NO production. These results also suggest that the model can be used to develop a useful diagnostic application such as the estimation of in vivo NO concentration.
