Modern CT and MRI scanners can provide a moving image of the heart, but they don’t show the complicated patterns of blood flow in and around the organ. Seeing the dynamic nature of patients’ hemodynamics may help surgeons prepare for complicated operations. At Stanford researchers are developing a pre-surgical tool that can take tomographic scans and simulate how the blood is moving within the patient. The same simulator can be used to predict the possible outcomes of making different surgical decisions.
The open-source software they’ve developed so far is now freely available and you can download it, play with it, and make any changes you wish.
Here’s Alison Marsden, PhD, a Stanford associate professor of pediatrics and bioengineering, discussing her and her colleagues research:
Link: SimVascular…
Via: SCOPE