An individual-based mechanical model of cell movement in heterogeneous tissues and its coarse-grained approximation

Mechanical heterogeneity in biological tissues, in particular stiffness, can be used to distinguish between healthy and diseased states. However, it is often difficult to explore relationships between cellular-level properties and tissue-level outcomes when biological experiments are performed at a single scale only. To overcome this difficulty we develop a multi-scale mathematical model which provides a clear framework to explore these connections across biological scales. Starting with an individual-based mechanical model of cell movement, we subsequently derive a novel coarse-grained system of partial differential equations governing the evolution of the cell density due to heterogeneous cellular properties. We demonstrate that solutions of the individual-based model converge to numerical solutions of the coarse-grained model, for both slowly-varying-in-space and rapidly-varying-in-space cellular properties. Applications of the model are discussed, including determining relative cellular-level properties and an interpretation of data from a breast cancer detection experiment.