Medical applications for human modeling

Healthcare companies, hospitals and medical devices manufacturers have been early adopters of Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) solutions to improve or develop innovative systems, prostheses or organs.

Virtual human tests help predicting the performance of medical devices, or the consequences of surgery, before cutting tissues, by pre-, per- and post-operative analysis. Insight into the dynamic behavior of prostheses in everyday life situations (walking, step climbing, load carrying, sport exercising, etc.) helps improving their lifetime and performance, as well as patients’ well being. In the same way, the prediction of air flow in lungs for respiratory devices, or blood flow in arteries after virtual clipping, within patient-specific morphology, opens a new era in medical and surgical practice.

Human models are an advanced numerical tool for various applications in this field, such as:
- Orthopedics, prosthesis and device design

Simulation of transfemoral amputee

- Soft organs, joints, (cardio) vascular diseases

Human knee model                              Total knee prothesis

- Respiratory system, drug delivery

Courtesy of CFDRC.

-  Virtual surgery, surgeon training, operation monitoring, rehabilitation analysis

- Patient-specific applications: technical environment increasingly favorable to numerical simulation

-  Multi-physics

Blood flow patterns in arteries with patient - specific geometry (Courtesy Pr. Lohner)

Human models developed by ESI can be adapted to the needs of medical applications.

For any medical topic, ESI offers its expertise and simulation solutions to adapt or develop virtual processes. For the understanding of prosthesis and organ behavior, the explicit structure (CSD, Computational Structural Dynamics) codes are used with whole (or sub-segment of) human models. ESI CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) flow codes are most adapted to tackle the challenge of hemodynamic simulation to help practitioners improve their skills and further their understanding of body parts. Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) can be tackled with coupled suites of CFD and CSD codes, when the flow of the medium deforms the organ and when the deformation of the organ influences the flow pattern (multi-physics).

Examples:
- Prosthesis:
o Total Knee Replacement (TKR)
 Stanmore Simulator: Device used to reproduce TKR motion during gait
 TKR in-situ of human knee
o Lower leg/foot prosthesis in-situ : Simulation of transfemoral amputee gait: Foot reaction analysis
- Simulation of patient-specific blood vessel clipping (Prof. Lohner collaboration)
- Bedsore-free design

Bedsore-free mattress (with cover)       Body pressure