Postgraduate Studentship on Modelling Coronary Blood Flow Dynamics - University of Oxford

Postgraduate Studentship Modelling Coronary Blood Flow Dynamics

Department of Mathematics - STUDENTSHIP covers fees (University and College) and maintenance.

Applications are invited for a postgraduate studentship, funded by the
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Global Research
Partnership [KAUST GRP], to work on "Modelling Coronary Blood Flow
Dynamics" under the supervision of Dr Nic Smith and Prof. Jon Chapman.
This DPhil studentship will start on 1 October 2009, is available to all
nationalities, covers maintenance and full overseas fees and will be
based in the newly established Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied
Mathematics (OCCAM).

OCCAM has been established with substantial funding from the KAUST GRP.
The Centre, which is part of the Mathematical Institute, will be allied
to a global network of mathematicians. Aiming to meet the
ever-increasing global demand for quantitative understanding of complex
scientific phenomena, OCCAM has been built on the strength of four
pre-existing groups of applied and computational mathematicians working
in Oxford: the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the
Centre for Mathematical Biology, the Numerical Analysis Group and the
Computational Biology Group. It has a symbiotic relationship with other
scientific communities which have a need for problem-solving mathematics
both within the University of Oxford and beyond. Over the first five
years the centre will employ 40 new staff and students.

Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the western
world. Recent advances in high performance computing and medical imaging
have lead to the development of detailed models of vascular structure
and blood flow respectively. These techniques now enable the simulation
of perfusion through three dimensional representations of vascular
geometry. However, there are two difficulties with these classes of
models: (1) the computational simulation of flow through complete
vascular beds from feeding vessels to capillaries is computationally
prohibitive and (2) it is impossible to measure flow in all vessels and
thus fully validate such models for clinical application. Recent
developments in Perfusion MRI and Nuclear Medicine by our clinical
collaborators at St Thomas' Hospital now provide the ability to
accurately measure blood volume in cardiac tissue. This presents an
opportunity to develop a novel modelling framework to explicitly address
these limitations by linking vascular structure to whole organ perfusion
through the application of a multi-scale porous-flow model.

The goal of this project will be to develop models with the potential to
directly interpret clinically acquired perfusion images and guide
revascularisation strategies in the heart. The methodology will be based
on homogenizing discrete vascular structures by applying previously
developed asymptotic approach. A key mathematical challenge will be
adapting the multiple scales technique to the hierarchical branching
structure of blood vessels. This may lead to a continuum sub-model for
each generation of vessel (e.g. capillaries, arterioles, small/large
coronary vessels) which are coupled to produce a full multi-domain and
multi-scale representational of coronary perfusion. These predicted
perfusion fields will be mathematically validated via comparison with
the perfusion fields determined using the discrete model whose structure
was used to define the porosity tensor. Finally the model will be
applied to human data collected at St Thomas' to assess the clinical
potential of the approach.

The collaborators on this project are Professor Jos Spaan (Department
Medical Physics, University of Amsterdam) and Professor Eike Nagel
(Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital).

The studentship is attached to St Anne's College.

For information about OCCAM please visit our website:
www.maths.ox.ac.uk/occam

Applications can be made online at
www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgraduate_courses/apply/how_to_apply.html and
should include a CV, covering letter, three references and a transcript
of your undergraduate degree. Alternatively, applications can be sent to
Margret Sloper at the Mathematical Institute using the University's
application form for graduate study, which can be downloaded from the
above link. Applications must arrive by end of day Friday 27th February
2009. The reference for this application is BK/08/058; make sure that
you state this in the covering letter. Applicants must arrange for their
referees to send references directly to the Graduate Studies Assistant
(fax or e-mail is sufficient) by the closing date. For further details
about the projects, including the application process, please see the
Further Particulars link below, or contact Graduate Studies, email
graduate.studies@maths.ox.ac.uk

Oxford University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.