IBM Research Award - Malossi Adelmo Cristiano Innocenza
© 2013 EPFL
Partitioned Solution of Geometrical Multiscale Problems for the Cardiovascular System: Models, Algorithms, and Applications. Thesis n° 5453. Dir.: Alfio Quarteroni & Simone Deparis.
"For having developed an original and highly efficient geometric multiscale method to simulate blood flow in the human circulatory system and validated it on a variety of clinical cases of remarkable interest".
Abstract: The aim of the thesis is the development of a geometrical multiscale framework for the parallel simulation of the human cardiovascular system, under either physiological or pathological conditions. The driving motivation is the awareness that cardiovascular dynamics are governed by the global interplay between the different compartments in the network. Thus, numerical simulations of stand-alone local components of the circulatory system cannot always predict effectively the physiological or pathological states of the patients, since they do not account for the interaction with the missing elements in the network.
The algorithms have been designed in an abstract parallel fashion, such that (i) the dimensionally-heterogeneous compartments, like three-dimensional and one-dimensional fluid-structure interaction models, as well as lumped parameters elements, can be easily coupled together to represent global patient-specific circulatory systems and (ii) the global network of elements can be efficiently solved on modern supercomputing facilities.
All the methodology has been tested over several applications, ranging from simple benchmark examples to more complex cardiovascular networks. In addition, two real clinical problems have been addressed: the simulation of a patient-specific left ventricle affected by myocardial infarction and the study of the optimal position for the anastomosis of a left ventricle assist device cannula.
