Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Computer simulation of human anatomy is expected to become an increasingly useful tool in medical research, diagnosis, and treatment. This project will improve the state of the art of such simulation by creating a complete computer model of the mouth and throat region, and using it to study several important medical disorders. These include sleep apnea (interrupted breathing during sleep), which afflicts an estimated twelve million Americans and can lead to complications such as heart disease; difficulty in swallowing as caused by stroke; and treating impairments of chewing and swallowing caused by surgery. Treatment of these conditions can be difficult because they involve complicated interactions between the nerves, muscles, and tissues of the mouth-throat region. Our model will help us better understand these interactions.To begin, we will create the model itself, which will contain the jaw, tongue, lips, throat, and surrounding structures and simulate their physical behaviour and motion. This will then allow us to answer questions such as "how do the nerves and muscles work together when we chew and swallow?" and "under what conditions will the tongue fall back and close the airway?". New techniques will be developed for improving the simulation's speed, with the goal of making it interactive. In collaboration with medical specialists, our model will be used to investigate causes and treatments for the medical conditions described above. Finally, we will study how medical imaging data can be used fit the model to individual patients, ultimately allowing it to be used as a clinical treatment tool. For example, a patient-specific model may be able to predict the side effects of surgery, or determine if a sleep apnea patient is a good candidate for treatment with a nighttime dental fixture.Our project is highly interdisciplinary, combining computer science, physics, biomechanics, physiology, anatomy, and medicine, and is expected to make important contributions to biomedicine, computer simulation, medical image processing, and the understanding and treatment of a variety of medical disorders.