Investigation of effect of collagen fiber orientation on tumor cell invasion

Abstract

Collagen fibers can both inhibit and promote cellular migration, based on their orientation. Physical models such as Random walk can regenerate cellular migration. As such, we proposed a model based on (biased) random walk to study migration on collagen fibers. We took mean squared displacement as the determinant factor for metastatic risk and found that direction of fibers, spatial correlations and migration mode together regulate the risk and we proposed an approach to quantify an existing prognostic approach.

Keywords

• cellular migration
• random walk
• collagen fiber
• invasion
• metastasis