InterPore 2021 online conference: Oliver Röhrle one of the invited speakers

March 16, 2021 / pa/sä

SimTech and SFB 1313 principal investigator Oliver Röhrle, head of the Institute for Modelling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems, will be one of the invited speakers of the InterPore2021 online conference, that will take place this year from 31 May to 4 June 2021.

Speaker: Prof. Oliver Röhrle
Title: „The Theory of Porous Media in Modelling Biological Tissues”
Date & Time: tba
Conference: InterPore 2021 online

Abstract

Experience and training are key aspects in medical practice. However, unlike other professions, medical practitioners have limited opportunities to perfect their skills before they must operate on people. Simulations help overcome such obstacles by carrying out virtual experiments, which would otherwise not be feasible. However, the human body is the most complex system known to mankind. The models for the simulations tend to be equally complex and computationally expensive. As humans are essentially a fluid saturated solid, empowering porous media models provides a useful and cost-effective tool for testing, analysing, planning and training of particular medical procedures. Simulating the vertebroplasty procedure, where a viscous fluid bone-cement is injected to the porous inside of vertebral bones to regain stability after the bone-cement has hardened, is one example. The key to use such simulations as a training / predictive tool is to validate the spread, i.e., the frontiers or the interfaces, of the injected bone cement (which is a PMMA), as it is injected, as well as the phase transition, i.e., the hardening process of the bone cement. Perfusion, i.e. flow of blood through capillaries into the heart or the organs, can be modelled using porous media as well. By including the transport equations, one can also model exchange processes occurring via advection, diffusion, and osmosis. Examples include vital processes like delivery of drugs to target organs, filtration of blood in the kidneys, gas exchange in the lungs, ion diffusion through the intervertebral disc, clotting of blood via thrombosis, etc., to name only a few. Especially linking the micro-scale chemical kinetics to tissue/organ scale porous media modelling is a powerful method for analysing, investigating and predicting (mechanical) behaviour of biological processes. There is a vast scope of applicability for porous media in the medical field, yet it is still largely untapped. Nevertheless, it has the potential to be one of the areas of mainstream research in the field, owing to its efficiency and versatility. In this talk, selected applications like the vertebroplasty and blood perfusion will be addressed. 

About Oliver Röhrle

Oliver Röhrle is Professor for “Continuum Biomechanics and Mechanobiology” and the founding Director of the Institute for Modelling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Fellow of the Stuttgart Center for Simulation Technology (SimTech), a Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2075 "Data-Integrated Simulation Science" and a Senior Research Expert at Fraunhofer IPA. He received a M.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, USA (1999) and his Diplom in “Wirtschaftsmathematik” at the University of Ulm (2000). After his PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA (2004), he spent 4 years as a research scientist at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the spokesperson for the Stuttgart-Auckland International Training Research Group on “Soft Tissue Robotics” and for the newly established DFG (German Research Foundation) funded Priority Programme on “Robustly coupling continuum-biomechanical in silico models to obtain active biological system models for later use in clinical applications - Co-design of modelling, numerics and usability”. His research focuses on multiscale computational modelling of soft biological tissues, in particular on modelling the musculoskseletal system. 

About the InterPore 2021 conference

This year's online InterPore 2021 conference (the 13th Annual Meeting of InterPore) will take place from 31 May to 4 June 2021. The annual InterPore Meeting is the most important Porous Media conference of the year with more than 1000 attendees from different disciplines). It gives researchers from all over the world the opportunity to meet and exchange the most recent porous media related results and to connect themselves.

InterPore2021 registration

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