We are delighted to announce our next Insigneo Seminar will be with Dr Jordi Alastruey, Senior Lecturer, King's College London, presenting on ‘In silico pulse wave databases for haemodynamic studies’ on Friday 28 January 2022. Insigneo Members please check your calendar invitations for online joining details. To request an invitation please contact info@insigneo.org.

Abstract:

Pulse wave (PW) signals are used for physiological assessment in both clinical medicine and consumer devices (e.g. smartwatches). They are influenced by the heart, vasculature, and respiratory and autonomic nervous systems, making them a rich source of information to assess human health. Consequently, many indices and algorithms have been proposed to infer the physiological state of the cardiovascular system by analysing PW morphology. Acquiring comprehensive databases for assessing the performance of these indices and algorithms is usually a complex and expensive task. To facilitate this process, we have created databases of simulated PWs representative of samples of real subjects using computational blood flow modelling. This is a novel and cost-effective approach for the development and pre-clinical testing of PW analysis algorithms across a wide range of cardiovascular conditions, in a relatively quick and inexpensive manner. In silico PW databases also allow us to understand biophysical mechanisms underlying correlations observed from populations of real subjects and train machine-learning algorithms for PW analysis across a wide range of physiological conditions. This talk will show how these datasets can be created, verified, and used in clinically relevant problems.

Short Bio:

Jordi Alastruey graduated with an MSc in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and obtained a PhD in Bioengineering from Imperial College London. His thesis focused on the development, validation, and application of a nonlinear one-dimensional model of pulse wave propagation in the arterial network. He then conducted postdoctoral research on computational flow modelling in the cardiovascular system at the Departments of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, Imperial College London. In 2009 he was awarded a British Heart Foundation research fellowship, which he started at Imperial before moving to King's in 2011. He was promoted to Lecturer in 2013 and to Senior Lecturer in 2017. His lab (www.haemod.uk) specialises in the assessment of cardiovascular function based on the analysis of pulse wave signals.