Free boundary value problems associated with the growth and development of multicellular spheroids

Abstract

In this paper a generalized model for the growth of avascular tumours is presented. The formulation leads naturally to the incorporation of free boundaries which define the outer tumour surface explicitly and various inner surfaces implicitly. A combination of numerical simulations, asymptotic analysis and perturbation techniques is used to study the model and yields results, which agree well with experimentally-observed phenomena.