b'Medical | Engineer InnovationMole Fraction of C0 20.050Vyaire Medical: Breathing new0.0400.030life into respiratory care 0.0200.010Leveraging CFD in the development of differentiated0.000respiratory and anesthesia care devicesStephen Ferguson talks with Dr. Christopher Varga, Senior Fellow at Vyaire Medical Figure 1: Vyaire respiratory mask on a real patient morphology (left) and Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation on the same representative patient geometry (right) able to extract meaningful engineeringbroad patient categories, Varga and hisengineers and researchers to design and data from those types of simulations,team are developing a complete librarybuild better solutions much more they don\'t allow us to simulate all of ourof patient morphologies and usageefficiently, said Varga. CFD already use cases realistically." scenarios. plays an important role in the front and the middle of our development cycle, For this reason, Varga set about"For example, consider a patient who isand we expect increasingly to find a role improving the simulation process bysick or an elderly woman who has stiffin regulatory validation and verification. gradually introducing more patient- lungs. We need to design devices thatThe power of simulation for medical specific data into CFD simulations, usingcan be used for that patient as well as adevice development has grown even Simcenter STAR-CCM+. more healthy patient, or perhaps even agreater with the capability to incorporate highly tuned professional athlete withthe patient into the simulation."We are now using scans of real humanenormous lung capacity, explained Dr. heads that represent the morphologiesVarga. "Within each patient category, weThe payoff for investing in this detailed of actual patient features. When it comesare starting to build that out, fromsimulation approach is significant.to respiratory simulations, weaverage to bariatric head models, so that incorporate lung structure and volumewe can simulate the entire spectrum of"Early in the development cycle, we using a variety of breathing profiles,"clinical usage." extensively use CFD to achieve our said Varga. "We are starting to build afeasibility goals through simulation library of patient morphologies, whichThe ability to optimize the capability of arather than using time-consuming and already consists of representative patientproduct across all it\'s possible usageexpensive physical prototypes", geometries for all of the patientscenarios means that simulation isconcluded Dr. Varga. "Having the populations: adult, pediatric, and infant. becoming more and more pervasive incapability to develop our products using the development process for medicalSimcenter STAR-CCM+ allows us to In other words, the simulations accountdevices. significantly reduce development times for "every stage of life." Vyaire\'sand results in higher quality products commitment to realistic simulationSimulation has brought to light a uniqueand better patient outcomes." ndoesn\'t stop there, though; within thoseexploratory power for medical device Figure 4: Samples of representative patient geometries scanned to generate simulations on patient-specific geometries17'