Modelling Heart Disease: Robogals Science Challenge 2015

• published: 07 Oct 2015
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Major Challenge entry to the Robogals Science Challenge 2015 Names of Participants: Sophie Ogilvy and Kaya Dahlke Intermediate Category Heart Disease Questions: 1. Why did you choose this project? * ============================= We want to help cure heart disease. We are interested in medicine, science and programming. So after lots of research we decided to do a project on coronary heart disease (plaque). 2. What did you enjoy most about the project? * ===================================== Kaya: I enjoyed learning to use blender to create and animate the artery with and without plaque as well as the blood cells, I also liked to research the heart and draw risk factors. Sophie: I know a lot of python and I enjoyed learning a new language in C# and finding answers on the web. I also enjoyed using Unity and iMovie, and using what I have learnt about HTML and CSS and statistics and modelling fluids and fluid dynamics. 3. What have you learned from this project? * =================================== Kaya learnt how to use Blender, how to program in HTML 5 as well as new facts about the heart. Sophie learnt more on how to program in C# and also learnt more about Unity and way more about the heart and that the facts were actually quite simple. Sophie learnt about modelling fluid dynamics by modelling the behaviour of the parts of the fluid. 4. How did your parent/guardian or mentor help you? * =========================================== Our mentor helped by suggesting that we do this competition again. And by organising to visit the museum for filming and by organising meetings for us to work together (and not play too much). 5. What do you think are the engineering applications of the knowledge found in your science project? * ========================================================================== Firstly, our virtual artery model can be used in medical settings, hospitals or doctors offices for example, to educate patients as well as in schools. Secondly, our virtual artery plaque system can also be used by medical engineers to try out cures for heart disease. The project is open source so people using the project can keep adding to it and already allows changing many things like pulse rate, plaque cell count and mix and many other things. 6a. Briefly explain the underlying scientific theories behind the project; why you chose this method and equipment; and whether the experiment is repeatable and why. ====================================================== We developed a virtual heart artery model to help finding a cure for heart disease. The heart is a very strong muscle, about the size of your fist. It continuously pumps blood around the body. Atherosclerosis is a condition were plaque builds up in the coronary arteries. Plaque is a fatty, waxy substance. It can build up in artery walls and cause many circulatory diseases. Atherosclerosis is the number one killer in developed countries. We used blender because it is a 3D animation program and was exactly what we wanted to make an artery with and without plaque as well as blood cells. Sophie used Unity and C# because of the physics engine allowed HTML 5 and CSS 3 was used to make our heart website which is hosted on github. Git was used to track versions and to help with sharing updates. First we made an artery with different plaque levels and without plaque, plus blood cells. Next we imported all of it into the game engine Unity, where we used the programming language C# to simulate the blood flow, capture the experiment results and calculate statistics. We simulated different plaque problems to compare the blood flow results to measure how hard the heart has to work to pump blood. We calculated the mean and standard deviation using our own program code as sample standard deviation. We used the artery containing plaque to conduct experiments simulating the changes to plaque that happen through treatments to restore blood flow. We simulated various treatments of atherosclerosis such as to cut out part of the artery with plaque and stents to open up artery sections which remove sections of plaque or open up the artery partly again. The simulations tell what effect on the plaque is most effective. After that we compared the treated artery, the untreated plaque artery and the healthy artery again by measuring their blood flows. Our experiments can be repeated easily because they were conducted in a virtual system. The can also be modified easily to add other simulations.