COMSOL Day: MedTech

Modeling and simulation is playing an increasingly important role in the medical device industry, helping organizations reduce physical prototyping, limit animal testing, and shorten development cycles. As simulation becomes more central to device design and regulatory submissions, establishing the credibility of computational models remains a challenge. The COMSOL Multiphysics^® software provides a comprehensive environment for building and validating multiphysics models relevant to medical technologies.

Join this session to learn how multiphysics simulation can support credible modeling and help advance safer, more innovative medical technologies. We will present verification and validation (V&V) examples spanning several physics areas, including electromagnetic heating, fluid–structure interaction, and transport phenomena. In addition, we will showcase studies that illustrate how modeling and simulation is applied in practice.

Dalila De Simone, Sorbonne University

Improving drug extravasation at targeted vascular sites remains a major challenge in the development of therapeutic strategies. Among external stimulation methods, ultrasound is attracting growing interest due to its potential to enhance drug transport across vascular barriers while being noninvasive and remotely controlled. In this context, microfluidic platforms provide a valuable tool for reproducing vascular-scale transport phenomena in vitro. In the development of such systems, numerical simulation plays a key role by enabling the investigation of coupled physical phenomena that are difficult to access experimentally while accelerating device optimization.

In this keynote talk, De Simone will discuss how she employs COMSOL Multiphysics^® in her work to characterize baseline flow conditions in a microfluidic vascular barrier model in the absence of ultrasound and to investigate how ultrasonic stimulation is transmitted and modifies the fluid flow within the device. She will explain how multiphysics simulation enables her to understand how ultrasound propagates through the microfluidic chip and identify the acoustic conditions required for the onset of acoustic streaming.

She will describe the simulation framework, which couples acoustic wave propagation and fluid dynamics to predict pressure field distributions, streaming patterns, and their dependence on excitation parameters and geometry. Finally, she will explain how experimental observations on the microfluidic platform are used to support model development and validation.

CFD simulation is a powerful tool in the development of medical technology, enabling virtual prototyping and deeper insight into the transport processes that determine device performance.

COMSOL Multiphysics^® and its add-on products offer a broad set of modeling features for simulating CFD, polymer flow, species transport, porous media flow, and microfluidics. The software's diverse capabilities are well suited for the wide range of biomedical applications, including blood pumps and blood vessels, biochemical sensors and diagnostic tests, lab-on-a-chip systems, and drug delivery devices.

In this session, we will demonstrate how to model transport-driven medical and biomedical devices using COMSOL Multiphysics^® and highlight multiphysics workflows relevant to both sensor performance and CFD-based design and analysis.

Medical technology development increasingly relies on complex 3D geometries originating from medical imaging, 3D scanning, and CAD design. In many cases, STL-based anatomical models and CAD-based device or implant components need to be combined to build simulation-ready digital prototypes.

The COMSOL Multiphysics^® software supports importing STL and CAD files, repairing and editing surface meshes, and forming watertight computational domains suitable for meshing and multiphysics simulation. This support includes tools for identifying and repairing defects such as holes and intersecting elements, repositioning and uniting multiple imported parts, resolving gaps and overlaps, and generating high-quality volume meshes from repaired surface meshes. The software also enables combining imported mesh-based anatomy with parameterized CAD or geometry created directly in COMSOL, making it possible to integrate implants and medical devices into patient-specific models and perform design studies.

This session gives an overview of the functionality used for importing, repairing, and combining STL and CAD models for applications within medical technology.

The use of modeling and simulation is essential in the development of minimally invasive therapies and procedures for analyzing heat generation in biological tissues. By incorporating thermal damage models, engineers and scientists can evaluate the efficacy and safety of clinical procedures, such as MRI examinations, and gain valuable insights into emerging technologies, such as pulsed field ablation. Moreover, as the use of implanted medical devices continues to grow, predicting and minimizing MRI-induced heating near implanted devices remains an important safety consideration.

Join this session for an in-depth look at how COMSOL Multiphysics^® can be used to implement an ASTM standard for assessing RF-induced heating in the vicinity of implants during MRI. We will also cover ablation procedures and discuss the capabilities in COMSOL Multiphysics^® for modeling the electromagnetic properties of biological tissues and cell membrane electroporation, both of which are critical to the development of pulsed field ablation technologies.

Modeling and simulation can be used to design and optimize medical devices involving acoustics and vibrations, as well as to support the regulatory approval process for new medical devices and treatments. For biomedical ultrasound technologies, well-established modeling practices exist for studying both diagnostic and therapeutic applications, such as real-time imaging, targeted drug delivery, and tumor ablation.

In this session, we will review the ultrasound modeling capabilities in COMSOL Multiphysics^®, beginning with a piezoelectric transducer array for diagnostic imaging. We will then cover therapeutic applications of focused ultrasound for tissue heating, including an uncertainty quantification (UQ) example using an FDA-approved tissue-mimicking material. In addition, we will go over nonlinear ultrasound modeling approaches for high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) propagation through a tissue phantom, including the resulting tissue heating.

Marie-Hélène Steger-Polt and Pascale Pham, CEA-Leti

Microphysiological systems (MPS), also known as organ-on-chip (OoC), are in vitro systems that combine biology, microfluidics, and material science to mimic the 3D microenvironment that accommodates biological tissues in vivo. Thereby, they provide physiologically relevant models that yield closer resemblance to in vivo conditions than classically used 2D cell cultures and animal models. In this context, the noninvasive, continuous, and real-time monitoring of MPS remains a critical challenge due to limitations in current sensing technologies, which often fail to provide high-resolution, real-time data on cellular behavior and tissue integrity.

Microelectrodes integrated into MPS devices can be used for electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), providing insights into cell viability, integrity, differentiation, and the deduction of transepithelial/transendothelial resistance (TEER) values. However, the interpretation of impedance spectra-derived TEER values remains poorly understood. To overcome this lack of understanding, the implementation of microscopically accessible microfluidic chips is highly desirable. Different strategies to achieve this implementation have been proposed, such as working with transparent but conductive materials like indium tin oxide (ITO) and depositing thin metal films or thin films of conductive polymers.

In this keynote talk, Marie-Hélène Steger-Polt and Pascale Pham will present the design and validation of a sandwich-like microfluidic chip with integrated electrodes that enable the simultaneous interrogation of a gut-on-chip tissue barrier through EIS and live microscopy. Ultimately, this dual interrogation should enable the correlation of these data sets to better interpret the impact of changes in tissue morphology on the obtained impedance spectra. For this purpose, an adjusted electrode layout was designed using the COMSOL Multiphysics^® software version 6.3.

Simulation-driven biomechanical analysis has become essential in the study of biomaterials and tissue biomechanics, enabling deeper insights through virtual testing. Biological tissues are nonlinear by nature, necessitating functionality for stress and strain analysis in fibrous media with complex anisotropy, material model calibration, and a wide range of loading conditions with large deformations.

Join this session to learn how COMSOL Multiphysics^® and its add-on products provide extensive capabilities for simulating the nonlinear behavior of soft tissues, including biphasic poroelasticity, explicit dynamics, and electrophysiology.