During each SIMULIA Community Conference (SCC), several parallel special interest group (SIG) sessions are hosted on the first day to provide attendees with similar industrial or technological interest with a platform to share their experiences with and learn from their fellow SCC attendees. The life sciences special interest group has been offered every year since 2008 due to the increasing interest in this area. Since its inception, this SIG has attracted large number of attendees from medical device companies, academia, engineering consulting firms and regulatory bodies.

This year we focused on two areas of special interest to the audience:

• An update on the ASME V&V 40 effort to develop computational model verification and validation standards for the Medical Devices industry specifically. As one of the most active members on the committee, Anita Bestelmeyer - Director of BD Corporate CAE, shared the progress of the committee with the audience.

Human heart modeling has been an area where a great gap is developed between what the academic cardiac research community has been able to achieve and what the commercial cardiac device manufacturers have been applying for device and therapy development. As a small step to bridge this gap, we invited well- known researchers from both medical device industry and academic research community to share their view and progress from both worlds. 

• Dr. Sanjeev Kulkarni - Fellow of Cardiology, Rhythm and Vascular at Boston Scientific, shared an review of medical devices, therapies and physics for the human heart.

• Dr. Ellen Kuhl - Associate professor at Stanford University, shared her latest research on multiscale continuum computational model of the heart.

In addition to the Life Sciences SIG, a number of very interesting life sciences papers were presented at the 2012 SCC. Among these presentations, the one given by Gary Richardson from Bausch + Lomb talked about one key area that all of us working in computational modeling domain have to pay close attention to, which is material calibration. He demonstrated how they were able to improve the accuracy of contact lens material parameters by combining Abaqus model with Isight data matching and optimization.  

At 2014 SIMULIA Community Conference in Providence, we will continue these exciting discussions on Life Sciences applications and technologies at the Special Interest Group meeting. In addition, we will share a very exciting project that is currently underway and look forward to seeing more exciting presentations from our user community.

Hope to see you in Providence this coming May!

Best regards,

Cheryl