Congratulations to Kristian Valen-Sendstad

Congratulations to BSL postdoc Kristian Valen-Sendstad, who has been awarded a Government of Canada Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for his studies of "turbulence" in cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics.

Kristian is also just back from an international vascular biomechanics conference in Atlanta, where his talk, "Is CFD Misleading Us About the Nature of Wall Shear Stresses in Cerebral Aneurysms?" generated a lot of interest and discussion, as well as lots of ideas for us to pursue here at the BSL.

Paper Published: Geometric Characterization of Cerebral Aneurysms

Congratulations to BSL collaborator Marina Piccinellli on the publication of "Automatic neck plane detection and 3D geometric characterization of aneurysmal sacs".  This VMTK paper had a long germination, starting several years ago during one of my trips to work with Luca Antiga in Bergamo, through to a rather long and tortuous review process.  On the other hand, once it was accepted it showed up online in record time!

In the spirit of our open-source philosophy, the Aneurisk models used in this study are available online, and VMTK code should appear soon.  We hope that this will spur some kind of standardization in the geometric definition of cerebral aneurysms, and so allow the kind of large, multicenter studies that are sorely needed.

Paper Accepted: Improved Prediction of Disturbed Flow

Congratulations to BSL PhD student Payam Bijari, whose paper "Improved prediction of disturbed flow via hemodynamically-inspired geometric variables" was recently accepted by the Journal of Biomechanics.

The gist of this study is that insight into the actual relationship between geometry and hemodynamics can be fed back into the definition of geometric variables for their use as practical surrogate markers of disturbed flow.  First stop: carotid bifurcation.  Next stop: cerebral aneurysms (or Greenwich Village :-)