Stroke Project
Chris Chaplin
Stroke kills nearly 150,000 people every year in the United States alone and understanding its prevention and treatment takes on an important role. The best method for mitigating stroke is thrombolysis, the reduction of clots by the introduction of blood thinners. To date, the window for using blood thinners in stroke treatment from the time of stroke onset is a mere 3 hours; this is because too little information is available for doctors to accurately assess the safety and efficacy of the method. The goal of this project is to expand that window by providing medical personnel with a risk-stratification for each patient. This patient-specific analysis will be accomplished by taking Computerized Tomography (CT) scans of the patient, building a 3D model of the cerebral vasculature from the scan, and simulating the biomechanics of the model. The simulation will incorporate fluid and solid mechanics codes in a parallel structure, which will maximize the accuracy and minimize the computational time. Our aim is to develop this software such that a hospital with a multi-core machine can perform the risk assessment in under ten minutes.
This project is part of the Par Lab, a multidisciplinary research project exploring the future of parallel processing: http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/
To hear Professor Keaveny describe the Stroke Project, check out the following link: