Beatrice Bisighini

Early Stage Researcher 03

My name is Beatrice Bisighini and in December 2019 I received a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. My academic background focused on the fields of biomechanics and biomaterials. Thanks to the Erasmus programme, I spent my final year at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, where I had the chance to broaden my knowledge in the field of biomedical signals and images acquisition and processing. With the motivation to pursue my biomechanical studies in an international environment, the MeDiTATe project seemed to me the perfect opportunity: the treated subjects represent new, unexplored but promising fields in the biomechanical studies of aneurysms and the eventual results will be beneficial for better designing medical devices and planning the endovascular treatment. My objective during the PhD period is to gain a deep biomechanical experience between academia and industry and establish a strong network with all the ESRs and the experts involved in the EU project.

I started my PhD at EMSE in September 2020. The focus of my project is the development of surgical assistive tools for the treatment of intracranial aneurysms. In particular, I am working on coupling finite-element models of stents and coils with reduced order model techniques in order to achieve real-time simulations. I spent the first year and a half at PrediSurge, a French start-up based in Saint Etienne focused on providing patient-specific numerical simulation technology to surgeons and healthcare companies. During this period, I have been developing an in-house, open-source, efficient finite element solver for beam-to-surface contact, which I am exploiting to perform stent deployment simulations. Moreover, I got some preliminary results on the FE-ROM framework with idealised geometries. In the following year and a half, a validation of the numerical results will be conducted by means of 3D printed models at Università Tor Vergata. During this period, I will also have the chance to visit the neurosurgical department of the Ferrara hospital and the HSL company in Trento.