Paper Published: Helical flow in carotid bifurcation as surrogate marker of exposure to disturbed shear

Congratulations to BSL collaborators Diego Gallo and Umberto Morbiducci, from Politecnico di Torino, on the publication of "Helical flow in carotid bifurcation as surrogate marker of exposure to disturbed shear."  This is one of the first outcomes of work that Diego Gallo started during his stay at the BSL while he was completing his PhD (and congratulations to now-Dr. Gallo!).  

The paper shows that one can anticipate the burden of disturbed wall shear stress via cleverly constructed bulk flow parameters based on helicity, which is a measure of the way flow swirls.  A key advantage of this is that 3D (well, 4D) velocity fields can be measured directly in vivo by MRI, from which data it is (relatively) straightforward to compute helicity, whereas it's much trickier to derive wall shear stress maps from such in vivo data.