An atlas of coronary arteries: Susann Beier is combining engineering and medicine to understand the way blood flows in the heart’s coronary arteries. This will ultimately lead to a personalised approaches to the treatment of heart disease.
Ruth Beran explores how MRI can help to improve stent designs, and ultimately improve heart disease treatment. In her interview with Susann Beier, the Researcher at the University of Auckland explains how she 3D prints patient vessels, to experimentally reproduce the blood flow through them. This allows magnetic resonance image (MRI) measurements as well as computational simulations for analyses to ultimately answer many of the still outstanding pressing questions about arterial disease. For example, why are some ethnicities more susceptible than others? How can we improve treatment success rates? What makes a good stent? And which patients would benefit from alternative treatments?