Rhinodiagnost - HPC for Precision Diagnostics of Nasal Cavities
The Rhinodiagnost project prepares the implementation of a NOSE Service Center to deliver new extended possibilities of functional diagnostics to practicing physicians in rhinology and to advance personalized medicine. For a meaningful rhinological diagnosis, advanced rhinomanometry methods and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are required to evaluate the effectiveness of patient-specific nasal functionalities.
Developments in the field of CFD and high-performance computing (HPC) allow us to individually predict the flow in a patient’s human nasal cavity by means of numerical simulations, thereby enabling us to identify anatomical locations of pathologies. Hence, results from CFD and rhinomanometry can be used to a priori determine optimal surgery strategies for the individual patient in order to increase the success rate of surgery and to adapt treatment therapies accordingly.
Two German medical device companies, namely Sutter Medizintechnik GmbH and Med Contact GmbH, are joining forces with the Austrian partner Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, and the two research facilities Institute of Aerodynamics (AIA) at RWTH Aachen University and Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich to implement the NOSE Service Center.
JSC will develop the software components, making the analysis of the simulation data accessible to the physician interactively and purposefully on modern HPC systems. Beyond this, the possibility of using virtual operations with direct updating and analysis of the flow parameters will be demonstrated in close cooperation with the AIA.
Rhinodiagnost is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) in Germany. The Austrian partner is funded by COIN (Cooperation and Innovation), Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW). The project is running under the auspices of IraSME (International research activities by SMEs) for three years beginning in September 2017. Further details can be found at http://www.rhinodiagnost.eu.
(Contact: Jens Henrik Göbbert, j.goebbert@fz-juelich.de)
from JSC News No. 252, 10 October 2017