Paper Published: CCA Geometry and Hemodynamics

The common carotid artery is, er, commonly assumed to be long and straight, which justifies the, er, common assumption of fully-developed flow in this artery.

On the other hand, in the latest issue of Physiological Measurement, we show the typical CCA possesses a compound curvature that, while modest, is sufficient to explain our prior observation of velocity profile skewing in this artery.

SBC2012 CFD Challenge

After years of talking about it, Frank Loth and I are finally running a CFD Challenge, at the 2012 ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference.  Details are available here, and you can email me for data/instructions on how to proceed with the first phase.

Comings and Goings

Some recent personnel changes at the BSL, celebrated as shown to the left:

Kristian Valen-Sendstad, who joins the BSL as a postdoc from Simula Research Labs in Norway, to continue his work on cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics.

Muhammad Owais Khan, who joins the BSL as a Master's student, investigating the role of curvature on arterial flow patterns.

And, finally, Yiemeng Hoi, who leaves the BSL for bigger and better (or at least more lucrative :-) things at Toshiba.

Book Chapter Published: Imagery in the 21st Century

Oliver Grau, Sean Cubitt, James Elkins, Martin Kemp ... and us?!?  Congratulations to Dolores Steinman, whose paper "Toward New Conventions for Visualizing Blood Flow in the Era of Fascination with Visibility and Imagery" has been published in Oliver Grau's latest book, Imagery in the 21st Century.

This chapter had a long incubation, starting from an email sent to Dolores in August 2007 by Jim Ruxton about a call for papers he'd received on "Gazing into the 21st Century: Confronting Image Naivete, The Second international Conference on Image Science in Goettweig, April 24th - 26th 2008".  (This is the same Jim Ruxton who, having come across our paper in Leonardo, had invited us to his Subtle Technologies Festival, the beginning of a beautiful friendship, to coin a phrase :-)

Following a postponement of the Goettweig conference, ticket cancellations (thank you Mastercard travel insurance), and then a rescheduling, we embarked in October 2008 on a month-long tour of conferences from Lisbon (SHOT) to Graz (MRA Club) to Goettweig to London (CHArt).  And speaking of incubation, Dolores was sick on and off throughout (having caught what we later found out to be walking pneumonia) but gamely gave her three talks (mine was at the MRA Club, in case there was any doubt). 

We were then invited by Oliver Grau to contribute a chapter to the book he was planning based on the Goettweig conference -- Oliver's earlier book, Media Art Histories, is a landmark in the field -- and the end result is now published for all to see.  Thanks to Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl for generously allowing us interlopers into their world; and the indomitable F. Scott Taylor (aka Scotus Dawgus aka Rabbi Scott) for encouraging us and ensuring that our chapter made sense.

Welcome Yuji Shimogonya

Yuji Shimogonya from the University of Hyogo will be working as a visiting scientist at the BSL for the next couple of months.  Dr. Shimogonya will be investigating various aspects of the Gradient Oscillatory Number (GON) hemodynamic factor that he recently proposed for predicting sites of aneurysm formation.

Paper Published: High Resolution Intracranial Wall Imaging

Imaging of the normally-thin artery wall remains a major challenge in MRI. Usually we must sacrifice axial slice thickness to achieve high in-plane spatial resolution, under the assumption that geometry and thickness changes through the ~2-mm-thick slices are negligible.  As we recently demonstrated, however, such thick slice acquisitions may be prone to appreciable artifacts if the slices cannot be perfectly aligned with the vessel.

In the latest issue of JMRI, my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I report on an approach to achieving isotropic spatial resolutions of 0.4 - 0.5 mm with black blood MRI. Not only does this allow us to resolve Italy (see above); it also allows us to resolve smaller changes or differences in wall thickness while avoiding the abovementioned obliqueness artifacts.

Nerd Alert

Computational modeling of cerebral aneurysms in popular culture!  -- well, popular nerd culture anyway: http://nerd-alert.net/blog/2011/06/phd-nightmares/.  Thanks to BSL alumna Keri Moyle for pointing me to this.