Collective behavior of platelets in blood clotting*

Blood clotting disorders prevent the body’s natural ability to achieve hemostasis and lead to bleeding, stroke or heart attack. Understanding the underlying physics behind the clotting process is essential to developing treatment of these disorders. Interaction between platelet and fibrin network leads to blood clotting, a highly complex multiscale mechanism taking place in blood flow. With experimental insights, we develop a mesoscale computational approach based on dissipative particle dynamics to examine the biophysics of clot contraction. The model contains platelets seeded in polymerized fibrin mesh. With platelets contracting surrounding fibrin, the model predicts bulk clot volume contraction and kinetics. The model shows that the heterogeneities involved in platelet contraction behavior enhance both clot volume contraction efficiency and clot force efficiency.