This project is a collaboration with Prof. Corina Drapaca of the Center for Neural Engineering at Penn State and with Prof. Luca Heltai of SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, Italy.
Hydrocephalus (see also the information available through NIH here) is a is a disorder of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) circulation that results in a build-up of fluid in the ventricles of the brain and a corresponding compression of the brain tissue against the skull. In very young children, hydrocephalus has a striking external manifestation, namely, a severe enlargement of the skull. The diagnose of hydrocephalus in the adult and the elderly (some estimate that 9–14% of the elderly in assisted facilities have some form of hydrocephalus) is more difficult to make. Awareness is slowly growing in the medical community about the fact that normal pressure hydrocephalus in the adult has been misdiagnosed for Alzheimer's disease and may in fact account for close to 5\% of all dementia diagnoses (roughly 375,000 people in USA alone). However, hydrocephalus is not a degenerative disease and it can be treated in some respects by restoring the CSF normal flow. Although research on the treatment of hydrocephalus started in the early 1960s with the work of Hakim, the causes and physiology of the various types of hydrocephalus are still too poorly understood.
The primary objective of this project is the construction of a computational framework for studying the fluid structure interaction between the CFS and the brain tissue. Ultimately, not only do we intend to account for the mechanical interaction, but we also intend to include the effects of the electro-chemical phenomena occurring at the boundary of CSF and brain.
We have chosen to implement an immersed finite element method, which is an extension to finite element of the immersed boundary method pioneered by Prof. Charles Peskin and co-workers.
Our first paper on this work has been published very recently and can be found here.
Here is a presentation given by Saswati Roy at SEM XII, International Congress and Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics, held at the Hilton Orange County, Costa Mesa, CA, June 11–14, 2012.