Individual PhD Project Information:
Host institution: TU Delft, The Netherlands
Supervisory team: Dr Mathias Peirlinck (PhD main supervisor, TUDelft), Prof. Nele Famaey (PhD co-supervisor, KU Leuven), Prof. Patrick Segers (PhD co-supervisor, UGent).
Enrolment in Doctoral School: Enrolled in the Graduate School of the TU Delft Faculty Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (TU Delft) and the Arenberg Doctoral School for Science, Engineering & Technology (KU Leuven).
PhD project description:
Cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The advent of in silico models has provided unprecedented opportunities for understanding, diagnosing, and treating these conditions through patient-specific simulations. However, the current deterministic nature of these models presents a significant barrier to their widespread adoption by industry and clinicians. Deterministic models often fail to capture the inherent variability, and uncertainties present in biological systems, which can lead to misinterpretations and suboptimal clinical decisions.
In this project, you will address these challenges by developing robust methods for uncertainty quantification and propagation within virtual human twin models of cardiovascular disease. More specifically, you will develop a systematic framework to quantify the impact of inherent inter-sample and -subject variability associated with experimental tissue tests, the intrinsic uncertainty of in vitro and in vivo imaging techniques, and the effect of noisy experimental and clinical measurements on computational models of the diseased heart and aorta.
This project entails a joint doctoral degree between Delft University of Technology and KU Leuven. The research will be conducted in TU Delft’s department of BioMechanical Engineering under the supervision of dr. ir. Mathias Peirlinck, and KU Leuven’s department of Mechanical Engineering division of Biomechancs (BMe) under the supervision of prof. dr. ir. Nele Famaey. More information on both research groups can be found on https://peirlincklab.com/ and https://www.mech.kuleuven.be/en/bme/research/soft-tissue-biomechanics.
Planned secondments:
- KU Leuven: Focused on gaining knowledge in experimental tissue testing techniques and deterministic material model fitting procedures currently used in the lab.