Upcoming Event: Babuška Forum

Immersed Isogeometric Modeling and Analysis in Computational Medicine

Thomas Hughes, Oden Institute

Abstract

"Computational Medicine is a rapidly growing field.  I would divide the history of Computational Medicine into two eras, one prior to the widespread use of medical imaging modalities and one since.  In the former era, Computational Medicine was in its infancy and the relevance of results, often computed on very simplified geometric configuration, was limited and had very little impact on clinical practice.  Since the clinical installation of imaging technology, the situation has changed significantly and continues to progress.  The early days of Computational Mechanics saw a similar evolution, but as computers became more powerful and ubiquitous in engineering design offices, the footprint of Computational Mechanics became pervasive.  Problems that could not be solver early on, such as full vehicle crash analysis in the 1980s, became routine by the late 1990s, and now we can say that cars are fully designed on computers.  

The fidelity of imaging modalities continues to advance and seems to behave similarly to the way Moore’s Law did for the number of transistors on a microchip.  It has been said that now an analog of Moore’s Law is at work in medical imaging, and it is clearly a driver for the development and application of Computational Medicine.  The future of Computational Medicine may look like the present of Computational Mechanics, which also continues to move forward.

The problems facing Computational Medicine are the complexity of organs and physiological processes, the current resolution of imaging modalities with reference to particular diseases, the relevant time scales to affect patient specific clinical decision making, and how to deliver the results of Computational Medicine analyses to the clinician.  The major technical pacing item is the accurate and efficient creation of computational models, which is also still the major bottleneck in the engineering design-through-analysis process.  Clearly, Isogeometric Analysis has a role to play in addressing the image-based modeling problem of Computational Medicine.  In engineering, the predominant modeling problem is building models from Computer Aided Design (CAD) files.  A question that is at present unanswered is should a CAD file first be created of the organs under consideration, or should the computational model be directly built from the segmentation of the organs, e.g., the coronary arteries, cancerous tumors, etc.?  Another question is where does AI and Machine Learning fit into the process of developing computational models from imaging data?  These technologies are already of use in some clinically available technologies, e.g., HeartFlow, Inc.

I do not have answers to all the questions, but I do have examples of how immersed Isogeometric Analysis is being used in Computational Medicine, both from the model building and equation solving perspectives.  In my presentation, I will focus on recent Isogeometric Analysis work on the detection and risk-assessment of vulnerable plaques in the walls of coronary arteries and a way to model essential sub-voxel (i.e., “invisible”) features. .  

In my opinion, research opportunities going forward abound for immersed Isogeometric Analysis and Computational Medicine."

Biography

"Thomas J.R. Hughes holds B.E. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Pratt Institute and an M.S. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley, Caltech, and Stanford before joining the University of Texas at Austin. At Stanford he served as Chairman of the Division of Applied Mechanics, Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chairman of the Division of Mechanics and Computation, and occupied the Crary Chair of Engineering.  

Dr. Hughes is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Section for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences), the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere (Mathematics Section), and the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. 

Dr. Hughes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM), the American Academy of Mechanics (AAM), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Engineering Mechanics Institute of ASCE, and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He is an Honorary Member of the Japanese Association for Computational Mechanics (JACM). 

Dr. Hughes is a Founder and past President of USACM and IACM, past Chairman of the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME, past Chairman of the US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and Editor Emeritus of the international journal Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering.  

One of the most widely cited authors in Engineering Science, Hughes has been elected to Distinguished Member, ASCE’s highest honor, and has received ASME’s highest honor, the ASME Medal. He has also been awarded the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and von Karman Medal from ASCE, the Timoshenko Medal, Worcester Reed Warner Medal, and Melville Medal from ASME, the von Neumann Medal from USACM, the Gauss-Newton Medal from IACM, the Computational Mechanics Award from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME), the Grand Prize from the Japan Society of Computational Engineering and Science (JSCES), the Computational Mechanics Award from JACM, the Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Wilhem Exner Medal from the Austrian Association für SME (Öesterreichischer Gewerbeverein, OGV), the International Scientific Career Award from the Argentinian Association for Computational Mechanics (AMCA), the SIAM/ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Prize in Computational Science and Engineering, the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Distinguished Scientist Award, the O.C. Zienkiewicz Medal from the Polish Association for Computational Mechanics (PACM), the A.C. Eringen Medal from the Society for Engineering Science (SES), the Ralph E. Kleinman Prize from SIAM, the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong, and the Monie A. Ferst Award from Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society.

Upon graduation from UC Berkeley, Hughes received the Bernard Freidman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics, the only engineer to have ever done so. At Stanford University, he received the Dean’s Award for Academic Accomplishment. At the University of Texas at Austin he has received the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award, the Billy and Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award, and the University Co-op Career Research Excellence Award.  He has also received the Alumni Achievement Award from Pratt"