A poroelastic-viscoelastic limit for modeling brain biomechanics

The brain, a mixture of neural and glia cells, vasculature, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), is one of the most complex organs in the human body. To understand brain responses to traumatic injuries and diseases of the central nervous system it is necessary to develop accurate mathematical models and corresponding computer simulations which can predict brain biomechanics and help design better diagnostic and therapeutic protocols. So far brain tissue has been modeled as either a poroelastic mixture saturated by CSF or as a (visco)-elastic solid. However, it is not obvious which model is more appropriate when investigating brain mechanics under certain physiological and pathological conditions. In this paper we study brain's mechanics by using a Kelvin-Voight (KV) model for a one-phase viscoelastic solid and a Kelvin-Voight-Maxwell-Biot (KVMB) model for a two-phase (solid and fluid) mixture, and explore the limit between these two models. To account for brain's evolving microstructure, we replace in the equations of motion the classic integer order time derivatives by Caputo fractional order derivatives and thus introduce corresponding fractional KV and KVMB models. As in soil mechanics we use the displacements of the solid phase in the classic (fractional) KVMB model and respectively of the classic (fractional) KV model to define a poroelastic-viscoelastic limit. Our results show that when the CSF and brain tissue in the classic (fractional) KVMB model have similar speeds, then the model is indistinguishable from its equivalent classic (fractional) KV model.