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Healthcare

Healthcare

Simulation can be the key to understanding complex issues, unlocking medical breakthroughs, and getting the latest advancements to the public faster, safer, and making them more broadly accessible. Altair helps medical companies across the world design better products, improve patient care, and reduce costs with simulation-driven design. Our simulation and optimization tools enable device designers and manufacturers to deliver quality and reliability while meeting regulatory standards, and our data analytics technologies empower healthcare providers to make faster, more informed decisions.

AM for Medical

Simulation-driven Design Guide

This guide explores the use of simulation to design complex AM solutions, explore material decisions, optimize structures for performance and ensure that designs can be printed efficiently.

Download the Guide

Feko used to reduce heating during MRI for Deep Brain Stimulation at Sunnybrook Research Institute

Reducing Clinical Trials

Device manufacturers are required to dedicate large amounts of time and expense to clinical tests to validate safety and performance claims. Simulation can speed up these trials by satisfying the testing of variables virtually. Multiple variants can be efficiently tested at a massive scale without human or animal testing. Replacing even one variable with simulation could mean saving months of testing time and help get products to the market faster than the competition.

Nolato uses Altair software to virtual design and test a medical autoinjector

Enhancing Device Design

Medical and wellness devices must be designed to withstand the structural and operational requirements associated with normal use, sterilization and misuse, all while balancing weight and cost considerations. Market demands for increased functionality, connectivity and miniaturization mean that all devices can benefit from the simulation of multiple physics, enabling optimization for all structural, thermal, electrical, electromagnetic and manufacturing criteria.

RF performance and safety prediction can be applied to MRI coil design, implant telemetry, surgical tools, and more

Safety in a Connected Environment

Ensuring safe electromagnetic operating conditions is vital as medical products become more connected. It is required that all devices meet radio frequency (RF) exposure standards to avoid adverse health effects. Computer simulations can carry out radiation performance evaluations that consider not just user position, posture, gender, age and height but the power, frequency and interaction of multiple devices.

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Global health organizations rely on Altair’s trusted data analytics tools to make faster, more informed decisions to improve quality of care and contain costs.

Altair Healthcare Analytics

In a rapidly shifting and complex industry, understanding the impact of the growing volume and digitization of patient, physician, regulatory, and financial data is crucial to healthcare organizations across the globe. Altair empowers providers, payers, and biopharma to make faster, more informed decisions by transforming disparate data and employing machine learning to maintain costs, improve clinical and financial efficiencies, manage resources and supply chains, and deliver better access to quality patient care.

Altair’s no code, self-service healthcare analytics solutions allow data scientists and operational systems users to optimize decision-making by managing and analyzing relevant clinical, claims, demographic, and revenue-adjacent data. Altair can help healthcare organizations to strategically and rapidly manage resource fluidity and comply with constantly changing regulatory requirements.

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Altair uses simulation to design an optimized solid-lattice hip implant that reduced stress shielding by more than 50%.

Orthopedic Implants and Replacement Structures

For more than 25 years, Altair® OptiStruct® has been the industry leader in developing and applying optimization technology for strong, lightweight designs. Developed to mimic how mechanical stresses influence optimal bone growth, it is now used to model complex biological structures and design optimized orthopedic structures. This includes lattice-designed, 3D printed components, ideal for osseointegration and promoting vascularization.

Patients with specific maladies can now be treated with custom-design implantable structures. Optimized using Altair technology, such replacement devices can be manufactured using 3D-printed resorbable biomaterials and serve as a temporary solution until the body grows its own tissue in replacement.

Customizable 3D printed children’s torso brace from Andiamo.

Prosthetics and Orthotics Design

Melding Optimization with Advanced Manufacturing

Altair simulation technology is widely used in the design of optimized structures in prosthetic and orthotic design, where custom fit is essential to a comfortable supportive structure. Clinicians and engineers have the ability to easily model patient-specific geometry with Altair® HyperMesh®, optimize the shape of the device to achieve the desired load transfer with OptiStruct, and understanding the manufacturing process of polymers with Altair® Inspire™ Mold and Altair® Inspire™ Print3D. This all adds up to custom successful fit for the patient, and ensured function of the device, and ideally a shorter time to wellness.

Cerebral blood flow simulation based on measurement shapes of the brain and main blood vessels.

Simulating the Complex Physics of the Human Body

Whether it’s importing external or internal patient scan data, HyperMesh has been a critical tool used by clinicians and engineers to accurately model the complex geometry of the human body. Once established, this model can then be exercised by a variety of Altair physics solvers and optimization methods to study bodily function and develop ways to improve patient care. For example, using shape optimization and elasto-plastic simulation, Altair can model complex biological systems such as the delicate structural behavior of intravascular stents within blood vessels. Vascular deformation and blood flow analyses can be performed to understand, predict, and prevent disorders.

Such tools are also essential to building accurate models of the 3D shape of the brain, acquired from MRI and CT data. These models help map cerebral vascular networks and diagnose and prevent brain disease. Further, Altair technology has been extensively applied to biomechanics, like studying injury thresholds for brain concussion in automotive safety and other applications within the field of sports medicine.

Featured Resources

Enhance Device Design and Reduce Clinical Trials Through Simulation

This biomedical webinar series highlights solutions for some of the healthcare industry's most complex challenges. Each session covers applications specific to the medical field including how to leverage multiphysics to enhance medical device design, using machine learning to optimize medical stents, improving mechatronics performance with model-based development software, leveraging additive manufacturing for the design of implants, and using optical modeling for biomedical systems and applications.

Webinars

Medtronic Reduces Medical Stent Stress by 71%

Medtronic designs and manufacturers medical devices used the world over. Traditionally, computer aided engineering (CAE) and virtual simulation were not fully utilized within the industry as the verification process for often microscopic components was too slow. When designing a new medical stent (an expandable mesh inserted into a patient's artery to keep it open) Medtronic wanted to improve the design and speed up the validation process. Altair ProductDesign worked closely with Medtronic’s own engineers to optimize the performance of the new stent.

Customer Stories

Virtual Product Design of a Medical Autoinjector

Sweden-based Nolato, a global provider of injection molded parts for numerous industrial and medical applications has developed Nolava as a collaborative project with companies including Altair and Avalon Innovation. Nolava is Nolato’s medical self-injector, a complex electro-mechanical device housed in an injection molded fiber-reinforced plastic body. Applying Altair’s state-of-the-art integrated simulation-driven design solution showed that virtual prototyping early in the design stage of development saves time and money by resolving problems before making a physical prototype or the associated manufacturing tooling.

Customer Stories

Leveraging Predictive Analytics in a Telehealth Environment

Hospitals and health systems are seeing huge increases in virtual medical visits, and it's expected that this trend will continue. Understanding how to best utilize telehealth will require a coordinated approach to analytics. Learn how healthcare organizations are leveraging existing data and predictive analytics to improve quality of care, optimize patient adherence, and reduce hospitalization and readmittance rates through teleheath engagement.

Data Anaytics Summit 2020
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