So long, Flanders!

We are sorry to see Jonathan Mynard leave the BSL to return down under to complete his postdoctoral research back home.  However, as a parting memento, he has left us with this startlingly accurate rendering of his friends at the BSL.  So long, Jonathan, it's been, er, ehhhhx-cellent, having you here!

SBC2012 CFD Challenge published in J Biomech Eng

It was a lot of work, but worth it. The results of the ASME 2012 Summer Bioengineering Conference's CFD Challenge are finally out in a special issue of J Biomech Eng. Thanks to everyone who participated so enthusiastically!  Future challenges are in the works (although not necessarily tied to SBC).

Payam Bijari, freshly PhD'd

Congratulations to BSL's Payam Bijari, who this morning successfully defended his PhD thesis, on "Investigation of Arterial Geometry as a Local Risk Factor for Carotid Atherosclerosis", before an eminent line-up of examiners including UofT's Richard Cobbold, John Sled and Myron Cybulsky; and George Tech's Don Giddens, who wisely declined our offer of a free mid-winter trip to Toronto!

Ignatius J. Reilly, Gene Hunter?!?

Recently Dolores and I received a link to Viruses on Time, a blog post about virology-themed covers of Time magazine, sent to us via a mailing list we joined as part of an ESF Conference on Truth and Trust in Images, which we attended and presented at last fall. While the virus nerds were probably pondering the ethics and aesthetics of the portrayals, I was struck by the March 9, 1981 cover featuring Genetech's Herbert Boyer.  My soft-and-squishy-but-bonily-encased pattern recognition engine leapt immediately into action, and reported (and I paraphrase): "Holy Crap, that's Ignatius J. Reilly".

For those who don't know, Reilly is the protagonist of one of my favourite novels,  A Confederacy of Dunces, introduced to me by my 12th grade English teacher, who could clearly spot a misfit when she met one. Maybe it's a coincidence, but Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 (posthumously, another interesting, but sad, story), the same year as that Time cover.

Maybe the cover artists were one in the same (unlikely).  Or maybe the Time's cover artist was a fan of the book (possible).  Or maybe it was just "in the air".  I'd like to think it was the latter, since it faintly echoes our (and many others', of course) belief that scientific visualizations are, extricably, a product of the broader culture in which they are created.

Velocity profile skewing and Doppler ultrasound

Congratulations to BSL postdoc Jonathan Mynard, who has two papers coming out about the practical impact of velocity profile skewing in "straight vessels" (see our previous work here and here).  The first paper, in press with published by Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology, shows that it may not always be reasonable to infer flow rate waveform shape from maximum Doppler velocity traces, particular using a Poiseuille assumption. The second paper, accepted published by Atherosclerosis, highlights the substantial errors that can arise when trying to infer wall shear stresses from Doppler velocities under the common assumption of fully-developed flow.

Paper Published: High-resolution CFD detects high-frequency velocity fluctuations in bifurcation, but not sidewall, aneurysms.

Congratulations to BSL postdoc Kristian Valen-Sendstad on the publication of "High-resolution CFD detects high-frequency velocity fluctuations in bifurcation, but not sidewall, aneurysms".  Admittedly we faced some challenges getting this paper published, in part owing to our early (over)enthusiasm about the apparent association between velocity fluctuations and rupture status, but also because of our unavoidable conclusion that the bulk of published aneurysm CFD model studies may not be sufficiently resolved. This latter conclusion may be easy to dismiss because our simulations were carried out under steady inflow conditions (albeit at peak systolic flow rates), but not for long...

Paper Published: . Impact of T2 decay on carotid artery wall thickness measurements

Another paper from our collaborators at Johns Hopkins, this one looking at the choice of MRI acquisition parameters can affect artery wall thickness and tissue characterization.  With the help of BSL Master's student Alex Martinez, we used an analytic MRI simulation approach, which Luca Antiga and I had previously used to characterize wall thickness artifacts due to slice resolution and orientation, to confirm that decreased wall thickness measurements with increased echo time is the result of adventitial signal decay.