Cindy Orozco

No one is exactly the same, so if two people express the same symptoms, why do they receive the same treatment? Personalized surgery can address this fact and lately it has become more accessible to different sectors of the population and different type of diseases. I develop methods for personalized surgery by recreating virtual personalized bones (from real patients!) to see how they behave under a force. One type of surgery I work on is fracture repair surgery. In this talk, I will teach you about the methods I use (including CAD-based software) to model stress and deformations in the bone. I am using applied mathematics to do this. I have developed a numerical method that translates information from a computational 3D tomography to a finite elements model using Non Uniform B-Splines. The objective of the numerical model is to reproduce the bone structure of a specific patient and apply mechanical simulation to understand its behavior. The first part of the method includes image processing and how to extract valuable information from medical imaging in an automatic process. The second part translates the physics laws into numerical approximations, using a method call Finite Elements. This helps to have deformation as a result of a series of formulas that a computer can solve. Third, we are interested in integrate the data with the model, with the requirements of the client (biomedical engineers and designers) and the tools they already use in CAD (using NURBS). Explaining each of the different steps in the process, as in any other mathematical application, lets us identify different sources of error and select independent tasks on the process.