Gabriel Balaban defended his PhD

Medical images provide detailed information which doctors can use to diagnose heart disease and plan treatements. Conditions such as myocardial infarctions and dyssynchrony can be recognized by their distinct motion patterns in images. The progression of these diseases however, is influenced by elastic forces and the ability of the muscles to contract. These cannot be viewed in images by themselves, but can instead be determined with the help of a mathematical model which is personalized to a patient.

In this thesis I develop methods for the creation of personalized models of heart motion using data from medical images. The result is a computer model of a patient's heart which moves the same way as in the images.The personalized model can then be used to provide elastic force and contraction information. Such models have been contructed before, but with the methods developed in this thesis, much greater resolution and accuracy is possible.

The thesis is written within the field of Biomedical Computing. The work has been conducted at Simula Research Laboratory.

Prior to the defense, at 10:15, Gabriel Balaban presented histrial lecture "Function of the human myocardium and its mechanical, electrical and chemical characterization based on in vivo measurements".

The adjudication committee

• Professor Gerhard Holzapfel, Institute of Biomechanics, Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Professor Johan Hoffmann, Department of Computational Science and Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Associate Professor Geir Kjetil Sandve, Department of informatics, University of Oslo

Chair of the disputation

• Head of Department for Informatics, Ellen Munthe-Kaas, Research Group for Logic and Intelligent Data

Supervisors

• Senior Research ScientistMarie E. Rognes,Simula Research Laboratory
• Senior LecturerJoakim Sundnes, Department of Informatics,University of Oslo

Read more

Announcement of the PhD defense at the University of Oslo's web pages.