Penn Scientists
Develop Large-scale Simulation of Human Blood
(April 30,
2012) Having a virtual copy of a patient’s blood in a computer would be a boon to
researchers and doctors. They could examine a simulated heart attack caused by
blood clotting in a diseased coronary artery and see if a drug like aspirin
would be effective in reducing the size of such a clot.
Now, a team
of biomedical engineers and hematologists at the University of Pennsylvania has
made large-scale, patient-specific simulations of blood function under the flow
conditions found in blood vessels, using robots to run hundreds of tests on
human platelets responding to combinations of activating agents that cause
clotting.