Abstract
The recent explosion in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms has started a revolution in many engineering fields, including computational biophysics. This talk focuses on our recent efforts to leverage ML methods to increase our fundamental understanding of skin and its unique ability to adapt to mechanical cues. The first project that will be described is skin growth in tissue expansion, a popular reconstructive surgery technique that grows new skin in response to sustained supra-physiological loading. We have created computational models that combine mechanics and mechanobiology to describe the deformation and growth of expanded skin. Together with experiments on a porcine model, and leveraging ML tools such as multi-fidelity Gaussian processes, we have performed Bayesian inference to learn mechanistically how skin grows in response to stretch. The second half of the talk will explore the use of ML for modeling of soft tissue without the need for closed-form models but still able to satisfy basic physics constraints such as polyconvexity of the strain energy. These data-driven material models are accurate and stable and can be used in large scale finite element simulations.
About the Speaker
Dr. Buganza-Tepole is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering (courtesy) at Purdue University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University before joining Purdue as a faculty member in 2016. He was also a Miller Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley during Spring 2022. His group studies the interplay between mechanics and mechanobiology of soft tissue, with skin as a model system. Using computational simulation, machine learning, and experimentation, his group seeks to characterize the multi-scale mechanics of skin to understand the fundamental mechanisms of tissue’s mechano-adaptation in order to improve clinical diagnostics and interventional tools.
Host: Professor Martin Starzewski
