The MRI machines and CAT scans, blood analyses and gene sequencing tools that are used to help diagnose our illnesses rely on advanced computing to extract knowledge out of molecular markers and reflected laser beams. A multidisciplinary team is working to develop a new tool to image, understand, and diagnose how air flows through the thousands of branching passageways of the lung, and how abnormalities can lead to illness. The approach to understanding the airflow and particle transport in the human lungs is quite novel based on computed tomography [CT] images to construct realistic human lung models, and then use computational fluid dynamics models to simulate the airflow through the lung. The computer simulations combine 20 years of experience modeling turbulence and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with cutting-edge medical imaging technologies to create a framework that will help doctors understand what causes asthma, how exposure to environmental pollutants alter the development of children’s lungs, and how the addition of helium to aerosol drugs can make pharmaceuticals more effective. This image shows a computerized representation of a subject-specific breathing human lung. The airflow in the CT-based airway tree is simulated on TACC supercomputers by the multiscale 3D-1D coupled CFD technique.
The system is not only a theoretical project. With a patent pending, and tools created by the group recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for clinical use, their research on TACC’s supercomputers will impact how doctors explore pulmonary problems in the near future. Multi-scale modeling is invaluable not only for simulating pulmonary airflow, but also for other physiological systems, including blood flow throughout the body. The data derived from researcher’s framework, because it is based on actual high-fidelity CT scans, is subject-specific, describing the lungs of a particular individual. This is critical for treatment purposes, and helps doctors explore diseases like asthma by comparing the airways of an asthmatic patient to a healthy subject. In addition to developing their novel computational framework, researchers are applying their system to a number of pressing biomedical questions where a realistic airway model is needed to derive genuine insights. For instance, drug-makers have long believed that mixing helium with drug aerosols can increase the effectiveness of certain pharmaceuticals, but they weren’t sure of the cause.More information:
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/research/users/features/dynamic.php?m_b_c=lin