The Department of Biomedical Engineering hosted seminar speaker Ajit Yoganathan, the Regents Professor and associate chair for research at the Georgia Institute of Technology on Sept. 29.

In his seminar, titled "Cardiovascular Engineering – A 'Personal' Journey from Bench to Bedside," Yoganathan explored the significant contributions that engineers have made to health care over the past few decades and discussed how the successful translation of fundamental engineering concepts has helped improve patient care and diagnosis.

This impact has been particularly evident in the field of cardiovascular medicine, where the roles of fluid and solid mechanics and imaging are critical. In its 38 years of pioneering research, Yoganathan's Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Georgia Tech has been in the vanguard of this movement: advancing knowledge and technology in native and replacement heart valves, cardiovascular diagnostic techniques, and pediatric surgical planning.

Using state-of-the-art fluid dynamic measurement techniques, Yoganathan and his group have developed methods to enable the optimization of replacement heart valve designs. Novel techniques in the assessment of native heart valve function have provided clinicians with improved tools to assess disease severity and helped identify effective treatment options. For the treatment of congenital heart defects, the development of novel computational modeling tools to simulate surgical procedures and their fluid dynamics outcomes have provided clinicians with new ways to plan for treatments for individual patients to increase the probability of success.

Combined, these advances have helped bridge the gap between lab bench and patient's bedside, and have helped integrate engineering science with the practice of medicine.