Title: Digital Twins For Stroke and Cerebrovascular Accidents: Challenges And Opportunities
Abstract: Stroke remains a leading global cause of death and severe disability despite multiple advancements in medicine and technology. The latest American Heart Association statistics reveal that, within the United States alone, an incidence of stroke occurs every 3 minutes and 11 seconds. Multiple state-of-the-art challenges underlie both characterization of the mechanisms and etiology of stroke, and assessment of stroke treatment efficacy. Leveraging in silico patient-specific models, and recent advances in digital twin technology, can provide a viable avenue to address these challenges. However, systematic data-integration, and development of efficient digital twin workflows that can ultimately lead to translatable tools, remain a substantially complex task. This presentation will demonstrate key findings from some of our recent works on embolic stroke etiology, and stroke outcomes in heart failure patients on mechanical circulatory support, where we have devised data-integrated digital twins and digital twin cohorts for stroke. Notably, we will outline the development of one of the largest heart-to-brain digital twin cohort models for studying stroke mechanics. We will further discuss several fundamental nuances of incorporating heterogeneous multi-modal data, which is common in clinical practice, and highlight key opportunities for AI/ML acceleration towards generating clinically useful metrics within the horizon of translationally relevant timescales. Our end goal will be to showcase the landscape of opportunities for data-driven digital twins, and AI/ML approaches, in enabling impactful advancements in stroke and broader cerebrovascular events.
Speaker Bio: Debanjan Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a program faculty for the Biomedical Engineering program, and a faculty council member at the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder. He leads an inter-disciplinary flow physics and biofluids research group named FLOWLab. Prof. Mukherjee completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Madras in India, and subsequently his doctoral and post-doctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley. He has received several awards in recognition of his work: including the National Institutes of Health Trailblazer Award for new and early-career investigators; the ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award; the American Heart Association post-doctoral fellowship award; and has recently been selected as a Research and Innovation office Faculty Fellow and a Dean’s Excellence Fellow in Generative AI at the University of Colorado Boulder.
