26. Digital Twins of Medical Devices – 4CBLW00-26

Digital twins are digital models that are connected to their physical counterpart by means of data. In this project, digital twins of medical interventional devices (e.g., catheters, stents, thrombectomy devices) and their interaction with human tissue (e.g., blood vessels) will be developed. These can be applied for device design, training of medical staff, navigation purposes during an actual medical procedure, or recycling and sustainability purposes (e.g., product lifecycle management). To enable the real-time simulation capability, game engines will be applied for realistic visualization. In addition, to describe the physical behavior of these devices and the interaction with human tissue adequately (e.g., device or blood vessel deformation), so-called physics engines are required. Examples are SOFA, LapGym, Mujoco, DART, PyBullet, Gazebo, OpenSIM, and PhysX. Multiple aspects will be covered in this project, such as verification and validation of software results, understanding of nonlinear physics-based simulations and solvers, assessment of the accuracy, speed, robustness, maintainability, and usability of different types of software, accelerating simulations (e.g., by graphic cards), assessing differences and limitations of open source, free, and commercial software tools, and how to break up complex problems into smaller but still meaningful problems.