APPLYING COMPUTER MODELING TO STUDY THE FLOW OF MATERIALS IN A HUMAN COLON

Abstract

Cancer kills about half a million people worldwide every year. The number seems to be growing rapidly for various reasons, such as dietary and life style. Clinically, determining the causes of cancer is a very difficult and protracted process. Colon cancer is a leading cause of cancer related death in the world, so better methods must be formulated to provide quicker diagnosis and low-cost treatments. Computer technology has advanced to a level where it can now be used routinely to assist in the medical diagnosis of diseases like cancer, and computational power has become affordable and widely available. This allows us to capitalize on software and hardware solutions, with a view to providing better ways to understand such diseases. The purpose of this paper is to use computer modeling and simulation to determine the effects of the irregularities induced in the walls of the human colon, and how these affect the movement of waste materials along this passage. Preliminary results indicate that these irregularities signal potential ‘hot spots’, which induce the stagnation of waste material. They subsequently grow larger and dramatically change the flow dynamics in the interior of the colon. In this work, we characterize these changes to gain a better understanding of the disease. Computer calculations make it possible to detect the presence of cancer, and also shed some light on the probability of a colonic tumor being malignant