Teams link: www.win.ox.ac.uk/events/win_seminar_jan_2025
Route description: www.win.ox.ac.uk/contact-us/finding-win-fmrib

The brain is our most complex organ and provides many scientific opportunities for engineering disciplines; yet, despite the obvious role of mechanics on the cell-level all the way to the organ-level, neuromechanics remains understudied. My research integrates experimental and computational methods to study the mechanobiological behavior of the human brain, with a particular interest in structural changes and tissue damage associated with aging and neurodegenerative diseases, myelination during development, and brain swelling during stroke. In this talk, I will introduce our computational approaches to simulating brain behavior during aging, neurodegeneration, and other neurological diseases. Our simulations predominantly build on anatomically accurate reconstructions of the brain and differentiate between gray matter, white matter, and fluid spaces. We develop multiphysics models that couple relevant biological mechanisms and mechanical response, i.e., tissue loading, swelling, and shrinking , depending on the application. Our applications have provided fundamental new insight into brain behavior and can be used to inform clinicians about long-term brain changes. Our models realistically reproduce hallmark features of cerebral atrophy during aging, the spatiotemporal progression patterns of biomarkers in neurodegenerative diseases, and the onset locations of white matter lesions due to mechanical overloading of the lateral ventricular wall. Our work is useful in identifying and systematically studying disease mechanisms with the overall goal to monitor brain changes in the clinical setting, support the development of intervention strategies, and move towards in silico clinical trials.