Overview

Cardiovascular prostheses are routinely used in surgical procedures to address congenital malformations, for example establishment of a pathway from the right ventricle to the pulmonary arteries (RV-PA) in pulmonary atresia and truncus arteriosus. Current solutions including donated human and animal products have limited biocompatibility and durability. Also, their fixed size necessitates multiple subsequent operations to upsize the conduit to match patients’ growth over their lifetime. Moreover, the handling characteristics and the pre-set shape of these implants increases the complexity of the operation to accommodate patient specific anatomy.

This talk will give an overview of a project that seeks to address these limitations by 3D printing geometrically-customized implants with potential growth capacity. This study demonstrates the significant role of computational modelling in optimization of the geometrical design of the conduits and evaluation of the performance of the material.

Speaker

Pegah Ebrahimi — winner of the NSW JCEC Postgraduate Best Presentation Competition 2018

Pegah is a postgraduate student in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The University of Sydney. She was the winner of the NSW JCEC Postgraduate Best Presentation Competition in 2018. Pegah obtained her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, which gave her strong computational and modelling skills. Her passion for employing her engineering skills to address medical issues drove her towards joining the multidisciplinary bioengineering research team at The University of Sydney that involved clinicians (under supervision of Professor David Winlaw) and experts in computational modelling (under supervision of Professor David Fletcher) and tissue engineering (under supervision of Professor Fariba Dehghani) to address challenges in treatment of the above mentioned category of congenital heart defects.

AGM

The JCEC is looking for motivate and passionate chemical engineers of all levels of experience to join the committee. If you feel that you can make a contribution to providing value for the chemical engineering community please consider joining the committee members at the AGM.

Time

17:45 — AGM
18:30 — Technical presentation

Light refreshments will be served.

Registration

RSVP: 22 February 2019 to Dr Jeffrey Shi or SMS 0411 449 522.

Continuing professional development

Eligible for 1 continuing professional development hour.