Abstract
Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is an experimental method of localized treatment to release high concentrations of the drug into a target area. An implementation of CED by our lab is the convection-enhanced thermo-therapy catheter system (CETCS). The device is a collection of arborizing microneedles used to affect a broader coverage of a dispersed volume in the regions of interest. We suspect the coverage of the dispersal volume depends on the material properties of the brain the infusate is being administered. In this study, we create a computational model to evaluate how two adjacent materials with varying permeability (4.45 mm4 N-1 s-1 with 13.35 or 35.6 mm4 N-1 s-1) will disperse into a 0.6% (w/w) agarose gel. Transient state analysis was conducted using the FEBio Software Suite. As expected, results show a much larger dispersal volume in the material with the higher permeability and along the border of the two materials.
