An interesting article has been published by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) about the work of CISM Rector Wolfgang Wall, professor of computational mechanics at the Technical University of Munich, who has been leading research in developing sophisticated lung models.

Patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) who are placed on ventilators too long suffer high mortality rates, a.o. due to lung damage caused by poorly calibrated ventilation parameters. But doctors may soon have a new tool to prevent these outcomes with a computational lung model that can map an individual patient's lung and for example gauge the strain imposed on tissues at the micro level. This can be also highly relevant in the current pandemic as a lot of COVID-19 patients in critical stages develop ARDS - according to first studies 80 to 90 % of COVID-19 fatalities had suffered from ARDS.

In addition his group and his spin off company Ebenbuild have developed an AI based automated lung analysis tool that can now also be used for detection and quantification of COVID-19 infected lung areas.

[Read the full article]

Additional information can also be found in a press release by TUM: https://www.tum.de/nc/en/about-tum/news/press-releases/details/35990/