Thèse entre le laboratoire TIMC de l'Université Grenoble Alpes et l'Université de Swansea (UK)
Mechanical Engineering: Fully Funded SUSPRS PhD Scholarship: Experimental characterisations and modelling of facial tissues for simulation of facial deformations
Funding providers:Swansea University Strategic Partnership Research Scholarships (SUSPRS) with Université Grenoble Alpes, France
Subject areas: Biomechanics, Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Experimental Mechanics
Project start date:
- 1 October 2024 (Enrolment open from mid-September)
- 1 January 2025 (Enrolment open from mid-December)
Supervisors:
-
Dr Mokarram Hossain
(Swansea - Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.)
- Professor Djordje Peric (Swansea
-
Professor Gregory Chagnon
(Grenoble Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.)
This is a joint PhD programme between Swansea University and Université Grenoble Alpes. Established in 2012/13, the Swansea and Grenoble (UGA) Institutional Strategic Partnership was one of the first major strategic partnerships between a UK and French university. It is a unique, institutional-wide multi-disciplinary collaboration, which includes joint research and publication, student and staff exchange, joint PhDs and joint master’s programmes. Over 30 Joint Doctoral Degrees have been developed through the strategic partnership to date, across diverse subject areas, including medicine, engineering and law. Candidates spend 50% of their time in both Swansea and Grenoble and are jointly supervised by academic staff from both universities. Successful candidates receive a double degree from the Université Grenoble Alpes and Swansea University.Thanks to increasingly precise and sophisticated medical imaging techniques and fast-growing powerful image morphing tools, there are ways to predict the appearance of a patient's face after surgery. Despite some limitations, these methods are currently in use, particularly in the field of cosmetic surgery. Some craniofacial surgeries are not primarily aimed at improving the appearance of the face, but at reconfiguring the bone and/or muscle structure of the face to improve or restore in the case of the after-effects of a trauma, the functional capacities of the patient's orofacial area (mastication, swallowing, speech, facial expressiveness, etc.). For that, the estimation of the post-operative configuration from a morphing of the pre-operative configuration is not sufficient: it is necessary to be able to offer practitioners’ tools capable of predicting how bone and muscle modifications will influence the patient's ability to chew, swallow, speak, smile or grimace. Such tools must be therefore based on biomechanical models that simulate the physical characteristics of the face and can simulate the action of the orofacial muscles on the soft tissues of the face and on the movements of the mandible and lips. Current research takes biomechanical modelling of the face, with or without integration of the muscle structures that mobilise the tissues during facial mimics or to produce speech. These models are intended to be tools in assisting surgery, but the lack of knowledge of mechanical properties and the non-optimal modelling of "soft parts" do not allow these models to be fully effective and used in clinic.The objective of the project is to set up a strategy for characterising the mechanical behaviour of biological tissues to link the limited measurements that can be made in vivo with the set of measurements that can be made in post-mortem. Afterwards, the aim is to adapt the constitutive equations to each patient and to come closer to a subject-specific simulation considering the predominant physical phenomena.
Project aim: Building upon unique and unparallel experimental works by the partner in Grenoble Alps University, France and advanced computational models pioneered by Zienkiewicz Institute at Swansea University, this
PhD project sets out an ambitious research plan which will investigate, with the help of cutting-edge computational modelling and experimental validation, two fundamental aspects:
(1) in vivo and post-mortem data of soft tissues around the human facial regions, to obtain maximum information and as closely as possible to the physiological data, and
(2) to propose physically motivated constitutive models from all the experimental data obtained, whether mechanical or imaging techniques.
Lien de candidature :
www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate/scholarsh...ental-2024-rs640.php
Auteur du sujet
