Getting to personalized vascular medicine: development of patient specific boundary conditions for treatment planning

Brooke Steele

With the anticipated increase in the number of Americans impacted by cardiovascular disease, it is expected that the cost to treat these patients will increase and further burden the healthcare system. A major effort is underway to use computational modeling to optimize patient specific treatment strategies and investigate hemodynamics in order to understand the both the vulnerability of plaques and the localization and progression of disease. Despite these advances in sophisticated hemodynamic analyses, the boundary conditions used in these computational models are based on outdated or idealized models or static experimental data resulting in highly detailed and probably incorrect hemodynamic values. To bridge this gap between highly sophisticated computational models and simplistic boundary conditions, we must develop sophisticated boundary conditions designed to mimic the vascular beds they represent. Such a specialized boundary condition would be designed to incorporate organ-specific, subject-specific, and dynamic behavior.

My group is currently working toward the development an integrated computational and experimental approach for predicting and modeling this subject- and organ-specific behavior. This technology will consist of a computational component for the efficient integration and computation of hemodynamic analysis, an analytic component for the determination of organ and patient specific parameters based on experimental data, and an experimental and data component for model training, prediction, and validation. The integrated analysis of physiologic and morphometric data and experimental verification will allow refinement of advanced hemodynamic analyses and lead to clinically accessible surgery planning systems and greater understanding of cardiovascular disease progression.