3D Modeling for Cardiac Surgical Planning

Join us for 3D Modeling for Cardiac Surgical Planning , an event on Tue, Oct. 14, 2025 at 7pm at Covalent Metrology, 925 Thompson Place, Sunnyvale, CA 94085. (Note that the in-person venue was originally advertised as SEMI in Milpitas.) (Also available via Zoom - see https://californiaconsultants.org/event/3d-modeling-for-cardiac-surgical-planning/)

We'll have free quality pizza and drinks starting at 6:30pm. Come early and network with our members, other engineers, interested parties, and possible consulting clients. A Zoom option for this hybrid event is at www.CaliforniaConsultants.org

Medical image-based modeling and digital twins have emerged as powerful tools to support patient-specific cardiac surgical planning in adults and children. This presentation will discuss 3D modeling techniques that provide a complete pipeline from medical image segmentation to 3D anatomic models and blood flow simulations. The technology that makes this possible was recently extended to model the whole heart, including blood flow, tissue mechanics, electrophysiology, cardiac contraction, and heart valves.

This presentation will also discuss recent applications of tools for clinical decision support. A first example is in adult cardiac surgery where patient-specific modeling has been applied for vein graft failure prevention after coronary bypass graft surgery. Another example is in pediatric cardiac surgery where models have been used for clinical decision support in valve repair, flow re-direction, and bi-ventricular reconstruction. The program will conclude with a discussion of the open-source and data resources that are available via the SimVascular project and the Vascular Model Repository.

Alison Marsden is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Disease in the Departments of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and, by courtesy, Mechanical Engineering at Stanford Univ. She is a member of the Institute for Mathematical and Computational Engineering. From 2007-2015 she was a faculty member in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCSD.

Dr. Marsden graduated with a BSE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton Univ. in 1998, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford in 2005. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Univ. in Bioengineering from 2005-07, and is the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2007, and an NSF CAREER award in 2011.

Alison was elected Fellow of AIMBE and SIAM in 2018, the APS DFD in 2020, BMES in 2021, and ASME in 2025. She is the 2023 recipient of the Van C. Mow medal from the ASME Bioengineering Division. She has published over 200 journal articles and holds leadership roles in several scientific societies, and her research focuses on the development of numerical methods for cardiovascular biomechanics and application of engineering methods to impact patient care in cardiovascular surgery and congenital heart disease. See also https://profiles.stanford.edu/alison-marsden