The MeDiTATe project will be participating in the XI Annual Meeting of the Italian Chapter of the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB-ITA22). The event, hosted by the BioCardioLab group from Fondazione Toscana G. Monasterio, will be held in Massa (Italy) on 6th and 7th October, 2022.

Five of our Early Stage Researchers will present the results of their work, described in the following lines.

Leonardo Geronzi – ESR 02: A method to calibrate the mechanical boundary conditions of a high-fidelity thoracic aorta model. In this work, a calibration of the mechanical boundary conditions for a thoracic aorta model was performed, including the effect of the soft tissue, the interaction of the vessel with the spine and the motion due to the heart. We minimised the discrepancy between the splines derived from the segmented boundaries of cine magnetic resonance imaging (cine-MRI) data and the respective splines built from the deformed computational model. We then performed fluid-structure interaction analysis with the calibrated patient-specific model studying the effect of the heart motion on the aortic wall.

Beatrice Bisighini – ESR 03: Towards a real-time simulator of flow diverters deployment based on model order reduction. With the aim of developing a computational tool to assist surgeons in the selection of the best device for patient-specific cerebral aneurysms treatment, in this study we propose a fast and accurate reduced-order modelling scheme, based on finite element simulations, to compute in real-time the deployed configuration of flow diverters within idealised vessel models.

Martino Andrea Scarpolini – ESR 09: Deploying digital twins of the cardiovascular system in clinics: a deep learning-based automatized framework. Digital twins represent a new powerful numerical tool to give personalized treatment for cardiovascular diseases, however their translation in a clinical environment is still limited mainly due to long computational times. This work shows an automatized workflow to build a real-time digital twin using deep learning algorithms and computational fluid dynamics simulations. Results show that the computation time can be reduced from hours to a few seconds.

Francesco Bardi – ESR 10: LED illuminated PIV velocity field characterization in a patient specific aortic aneurysm phantom. The Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) is a highly diffused life-threatening condition. In recent years, experimental and numerical techniques were demonstrated to be reliable tools for AAA investigation. Given this, a Hybrid Mock Circulatory Loop and a cost-effective LED Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) setup were used to characterize the fluid dynamic behaviour in a compliant AAA phantom. Several boundary conditions have been tested, and the instantaneous velocity field was measured in lower part of the aneurysm.

Maria Nicole Antonuccio – ESR 14: An experimental/computational approach for fluid dynamic characterization of AAA Compliant phantoms and experimental circulatory loops have gathered importance over the years as they can reproduce hemodynamics at a patient-specific level in terms of both 3D geometry and inlet/outlet boundary conditions. If combined with medical imaging, such as echography, these tools can deepen the knowledge of cardiovascular pathologies. In this work, flow fields in an abdominal aortic aneurysm phantom are reconstructed from Color-Doppler Ultrasound images. In-silico data, obtained from Computational Fluid Dynamics, are used for further comparisons.