Session: Rising Stars of Mechanical Engineering Celebration & Showcase

Paper Number: 148187

148187 - Career: Multiscale Modeling of Thrombus Formation and Its Response to External Loads 

A thrombus is subject to different loads in vivo, such as pulsatile flow, vasodilation, and collision from cells. Understanding its formation and response to in vivo stress and external loads is important in thrombus growth prediction and treatment. Thrombi are heterogeneous biomaterials made of different components such as red blood cells (RBCs), fibrin, platelets, and other biopolymers in the plasma. They may include sickle cells and white blood cells in patients with different diseases. The flow impacts the formation and composition of thrombi, which in-return determines the strength of thrombi and their response to flow. The overall objective of this CAREER proposal is to develop a multiscale model to predict thrombus growth and response under different flow conditions. Specifically, it will: 1) identify and investigate the impact of key dimensionless parameters on thrombus growth and structure considering flow, RBCs, platelets, fibrin, von Willebrand factor; 2) characterize thrombus response including deformation and rupture due to pulsatile flow and vessel wall deformation with given composition; 3) predict thrombus growth, rupture, and quantify its uncertainties in large scale vascular network using physics informed neural network (PINN) augmented one-dimensional models. The objective is a critical step toward my long-term goal to investigate multiscale physics of biomaterials, and provide support for clinical decision-making for surgery and treatment. The research is novel as it will enable patient-specific modeling of thrombus growth through multiscale models, establish key dimensionless parameters for thrombus growth, and develop a PINN augmented reduced order model for uncertainty quantification in thrombus modeling.

Presenting Author: Jifu Tan Northern Illinois University

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Jifu Tan currently is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at Northern Illinois University
(NIU). Before that, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering
from Lehigh University in 2015 and 2012, respectively. He received his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering
from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2007. His primary research interest is fluid structure interaction and
its application in engineering and medicine, such as nanoparticle delivery, blood flow modeling,
thrombosis and bleeding simulation, microfluidic device design for cell separation. He is also interested
in high performance computing, multiscale modeling, data driven models, and machine learning. He is
actively engaged in developing open-source code for scientific research. He is the recipient of the 2024
David W. Raymond Award for Use of Technology in Teaching at NIU. He is also the recipient of NSF
CAREER award in 2024.

Authors: