COPERNICUS project

Cloud-based HPC platform to support systemic-pulmonary shunting procedures

Congenital heart diseases (CHDs) account for nearly one-third of all congenital birth defects. Without the ability to alter the prevalence of CHD, interventions and resources must be focused to improve survival and quality of life. The Modified Blalock Taussig Shunt (mBTS) is a common palliative operation on cyanotic heart diseases, but it is associated with significant mortality, the most threatening complications being over-shunting and shunt thrombosis.

The proposed application experiment aims at setting up an application to support surgical planning with advanced numerical means, exposed in an interactive and effective manner.

This application will use patient-specific computationally intensive models running in a reliable and cost-efficient way on a cloud-based HPC environment. The experiment aims at building up an affordable decision support web application that, thanks to the medical digital twin (MDT), allows surgeons approaching the mBTS medical intervention at best. The tool generates the ROM of a patient-specific vascular district in which the shunt implantation is geometrically parameterized. The ROM generates pre-defined CFD results of different configurations of the vasculature with shunt implantation. By a dedicated User Interface, the medical staff will be able to inspect the MDT of the patient in an interactive way, to finalize the decisions on surgical intervention.

Partners:

End User: InSilicoTrials Technologies SpA
Technology expert, ISV: RBF Morph Srl 
Application expert, End-User: Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio
Technology expert: RINA Consulting
HPC expert, Host Centre: CINECA