Before any medical care begins, an accurate diagnosis is necessary not only to recommend the right treatment but also to avoid unnecessary costs. Properly diagnosing a health problem can be difficult, and physicians are always seeking ways to provide the best care. In the last few decades, tremendous progress has been made to minimize the invasiveness of surgical procedures and fine-tune the relevance of information gathered during the patient-specific examination and imaging phase. Despite the availability of large amounts of valuable data, major uncertainties still impact medical decisions: the geometry is different for each person, the material properties of tissue, blood and bone are also patient-specific. The complexity of the body poses a multidimensional challenge to medical experts. Using the exact geometry of a femur head, a blood vessel or the bronchial tree, for example, combined with patient-specific material properties and real-life parameters such as blood flow, inhalation pressure or load applied on bones, engineering simulation software from ANSYS allows the development of a virtual model of patient-specific anatomy. From the model of a femur, it is possible to test the actual risk of fracture under normal and extreme conditions without the patient experiencing any pain. Similarly, cardiovascular systems can be studied to refine the aneurysm risk evaluation before dramatic deterioration. The combination of modern imaging techniques with CAE technology in the biomedical arena allows the wealth of patient-specific data to be brought into a virtual model of the patient, providing the decision-maker with more information about what is likely to happen under various life conditions. It is then possible to use this more sophisticated data to derive a better diagnosis which, in many cases, can reduce the number of surgical procedures. This new approach allowing users, be it a medical engineer or soon a clinician, to take advantage of this new technology through simplified or very advanced models is what we call engineered scalability. Its adjustment to specific clinicians' environment is the natural next step using the adaptive architecture of ANSYS. |
From patient …
… to CT Scan …
… to solid modeling …
… to fluid structure interaction and aneurysm modelling.
Geometry: Courtesy of LTSI INSERM, University Rennes I |
