WEISS vascular team wins EPSRC Transformative Healthcare Technologies Grant

Congratulations to Profs Stavroula Balabani, Vanessa Diaz and Janice Tsui who have been awarded an EPSRC Healthcare Technologies grant for their project ‘Hidden haemodynamics: A Physics-InfOrmed, real-time recoNstruction framEwork for haEmodynamic virtual pRototyping and clinical support (PIONEER)’, in collaboration with the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. The team fought strong competition from all over the UK: PIONEER was selected among 200 applications through a two-stage process. The project will fund a feasibility study to seed the team’s vision for the vascular surgery of the future and prepare the foundations for the phase II funding next year by expanding collaborations and partners and consolidating clinical applications.  

PIONEER will develop the most sophisticated, physics-driven computational tools that will extract, in real/near real time, accurate unsteady and three-dimensional hemodynamic information (velocity and pressure) from qualitative, under-resolved and incomplete patient data of complex vascular pathologies. This will be done by fusing traditional CFD approaches, reduced-order modelling (ROMs), medical imaging, and state of the art data assimilation. The information will be used for haemodynamic virtual prototyping of personalised cardiovascular interventions and tailoring of cardiovascular devices, enabling a fundamental step forward towards precision vascular surgery.

The project is supported by Aortic Awareness UK, AVM Butterfly Charity and Terumo Aortic. As part of the project UCL WEISS was selected to host the Aortic Dissection Awareness Day UK in 2022.