2023 Medical Student Research Day Abstracts

Medical student research day is designed to highlight the breadth of research and scholarly activity that medical students have accomplished during their education at The GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences. All medical students are invited to present research regardless of the area of focus. Abstract submissions represent a broad range of research interests and disciplines, including basic and translational science, clinical research, health policy and public health research, and education-related research

Efficient cardio-vascular 4D-Flow MRI enabled CFD to improve in-silico predictions of post-surgical haemodynamics in individual patients

This thesis focuses on creating a workflow that combines four dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging with computational fluid dynamics techniques, and identifying the main difficulties that are associated with patient-specific modelling. With further development, the proposed work- flow will allow post-surgical haemodynamics to be predicted prior to surgical intervention taking place, ensuring the best possible outcome is achieved for the individual patient. The use of patient-specific computational fluid dynamic modelling in diagnostics and risk stratification, treatment planning, and surgical intervention is quickly becoming an invaluable tool and has proven key in multiple medical advances and breakthroughs. However, existing methods to combine medical imaging and computational fluid dynamics techniques often require invasive procedures to collect appropriate patient-specific data, require expensive software licenses, or have significant limitations within the methodologies, such as inlet conditions or spatial resolutions. The research within this thesis provides a workflow to combine four dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging and computational fluid dynamics, using open source software when possible, and a non-invasive and non-ionising imaging technique. The major challenges of patient-specific modelling are investigated. By increasing the complexity of the workflow incrementally, the impacts of physiologically accurate inlet boundary conditions are assessed, as is the human error that is introduced into patient-specific modelling through the geometry reconstruction process. The workflow created is tested on a wide age range of patients and bicuspid aortic valve phenotypes. To validate the workflow created, the methods used were applied to an anatomical flow phantom, therefore the in-vivo challenges of the thoracic aorta moving radially and vertically, and the systemic circulatory system distal to the outlets were removed. This research has shown that the workflow proposed produces good agreement with four dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging data, notably in the ascending aorta during the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle. A significant challenge of patient-specific modelling that is often acknowledged yet not fully quantified is the spatial resolution of the four dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging. Research therefore focused on determining how the spatial resolution at which the four dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging data is acquired at impacts the subsequent patient-specific computational fluid dynamics simulations. The results presented show that coarse spatial resolutions have a significant impact on the results of numerical simulations. From the results presented, a recommendation of a minimum spatial resolution that should be used when conducting patient-specific simulations was made to avoid errors being introduced into the numerical simulations

Medical-Data-Models.org:A collection of freely available forms (September 2016)

MDM-Portal (Medical Data-Models) is a meta-data repository for creating, analysing, sharing and reusing medical forms, developed by the Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Muenster in Germany. Electronic forms for documentation of patient data are an integral part within the workflow of physicians. A huge amount of data is collected either through routine documentation forms (EHRs) for electronic health records or as case report forms (CRFs) for clinical trials. This raises major scientific challenges for health care, since different health information systems are not necessarily compatible with each other and thus information exchange of structured data is hampered. Software vendors provide a variety of individual documentation forms according to their standard contracts, which function as isolated applications. Furthermore, free availability of those forms is rarely the case. Currently less than 5 % of medical forms are freely accessible. Based on this lack of transparency harmonization of data models in health care is extremely cumbersome, thus work and know-how of completed clinical trials and routine documentation in hospitals are hard to be re-used. The MDM-Portal serves as an infrastructure for academic (non-commercial) medical research to contribute a solution to this problem. It already contains more than 4,000 system-independent forms (CDISC ODM Format, www.cdisc.org, Operational Data Model) with more than 380,000 dataelements. This enables researchers to view, discuss, download and export forms in most common technical formats such as PDF, CSV, Excel, SQL, SPSS, R, etc. A growing user community will lead to a growing database of medical forms. In this matter, we would like to encourage all medical researchers to register and add forms and discuss existing forms