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Studying transport processes in the brain's extracellular space is a complicated problem when considering the brain's tissue. Tests of corresponding physical and mathematical problems, as well as the need for materials with cheap but realistic properties to allow for testing of drug delivery systems, lead to the development of artificial phantom media, one kind of which is explored in this work. We report results from quantifying the spread of a standard contrast agent used in clinical computed tomography, Iopromide, in samples of collagen-based hydrogels. Its pure variant as well as samples supplied with lipid and surfactant additives were explored. By comparing to solutions of the diffusion equation which reproduce these data, the respective diffusion coefficients were determined. It was shown that they are relevant to the range typical for living tissue, grow with elevation in the lipid content and diminish with growth in surfactant concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mechanisms of transport of substances in the brain parenchyma have been a hot topic in scientific discussion in the past decade. This discussion was triggered by the proposed glymphatic hypothesis, which assumes a directed flow of cerebral fluid within the parenchyma, in contrast to the previous notion that diffusion is the main mechanism. However, when discussing the issue of "diffusion or non-diffusion", much less attention was given to the question that diffusion itself can have a different character. In our opinion, some of the recently published results do not fit into the traditional understanding of diffusion. In this regard, we outline the relevant new theoretical approaches on transport processes in complex random media such as concepts of diffusive diffusivity and time-dependent homogenization, which expands the understanding of the forms of transport of substances based on diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We consider the diffusion of markers in a layered medium, with the lateral diffusion coefficient being the function of hight. We show that the probability density of the lateral displacements follows a one-dimensional Batchelor’s equation with time-dependent diffusion coefficient governed by the particles’ redistribution in height. For the film of a finite thickness the resulting mean squared displacement exhibits superdiffusion at short times and crosses over to normal diffusion at long times. The approach is used for a description of experimental results on inhomogeneous molecular diffusion in thin liquid films deposited on solid surfaces. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We propose an approach to analysing single trajectories of a particle, which moves randomly on a landscape distinct parts of which result in sufficiently various diffusion coefficients. The method based on the mapping the cumulative sum of step-wise elementary displacement squared into a complex oscillating function with the subsequent continuous wavelet analysis of the later allows the localization of relatively homogeneous sub-regions and determining values of the diffusion coefficient within each such sub-region. This approach is applied to demonstrable test examples as well as to the reconstruction of the biological membrane's properties from the real data of single molecule walk tracing. • Revealing patches with different diffusivity from a single particle track. • An improved continuous wavelet transform for exploring random walks. • Processing a case study of real biological membrane visited by a walking molecule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]