Jose F Rodriguez

Jose F Rodriguez
Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta"

PhD Mechanical Engineering

About

233
Publications
38,925
Reads
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4,769
Citations
Additional affiliations
March 2015 - present
Politecnico di Milano
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
December 2003 - February 2015
University of Zaragoza
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
Education
August 1995 - July 1999
University of Notre Dame
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering
September 1988 - April 1993
Simón Bolívar University
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering

Publications

Publications (233)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) is one of the major causes of mortality around the globe, with six and a half million people dying annually. Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) is an effective and successful treatment option for AIS patients. Although MT is a standard technique to retrieve thrombus, the failure rate is significant. Various in vitro studies re...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness worldwide, is primarily caused by elevated intraocular pressure (IOP). Accurate and reliable IOP measurements are the key to diagnose the pathology in time and to provide for effective treatment strategies. The currently available methods for measuring IOP include contact and non contact tonomete...
Article
Full-text available
Multiscale agent-based modeling frameworks have recently emerged as promising mechanobiological models to capture the interplay between biomechanical forces, cellular behavior, and molecular pathways underlying restenosis following percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA). However, their applications are mainly limited to idealized scenarios. He...
Article
Introduction: In-vitro evaluation (analysis in a bench top flow model) is the gold standard for pre-clinical investigation of devices being developed for endovascular thrombectomy (EVT). In-silico evaluation (computer simulated analysis in a virtual stroke model) has the potential to test and optimize large number of stent-retriever design variatio...
Article
Introduction In‐vitro evaluation (analysis in a bench top flow model) is the gold standard and a regulatory requirement for pre‐clinical investigation of devices being developed for endovascular thrombectomy (EVT). In‐silico evaluation (computer simulated analysis in a virtual stroke model) has the potential to test and optimize large number of ste...
Article
Full-text available
The development of in silico trials based on high-fidelity simulations of clinical procedures requires the availability of large cohorts of three-dimensional (3D) patient-specific anatomy models, which are often hard to collect due to limited availability and/or accessibility and imaging quality. Statistical shape modeling (SSM) allows one to ident...
Article
Full-text available
Measuring Intraocular Pressure (IOP) is a critical field of research in ophthalmology. This work presents and energetic approach to study the Non Contact Tonometry based on the results of a Fluid Structure Interaction simulation. Then, combining these results with clinical images, a new method to estimate the IOP is proposed.
Article
Full-text available
This manuscript presents a novel formulation for a linear elastic model of a heterogeneous arterial section undergoing uniform pressure in a quasi-static regime. The novelties are twofold. First, an elastic bed support on the external boundary (elastic bed boundary condition) replaces the classical Dirichlet boundary condition (i.e., blocking displ...
Article
Background and objective: Mechanical thrombectomy is a minimally invasive procedure that aims at removing the occluding thrombus from the vasculature of acute ischemic stroke patients. Thrombectomy success and failure can be studied using in-silico thrombectomy models. Such models require realistic modeling steps to be effective. We here present a...
Article
Full-text available
Acute myocardial ischemia induces hyperkalemia (accumulation of extracellular potassium), a major perpetrator of lethal reentrant ventricular arrhythmias. Despite considerable experimental efforts to explain this pathology in the last decades, the intimate mechanisms behind hyperkalemia remain partially unknown. In order to investigate these mechan...
Article
Additive manufacturing is widely used in the orthopaedic industry for the high freedom and flexibility in the design and production of personalized custom implants made of Ti6Al4V. Within this context, finite element modeling of 3D printed prostheses is a robust tool both to guide the design phase and to support clinical evaluations, possibly virtu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The frequency of the ECG fibrillatory f-waves (Ff) in atrial fibrillation (AF) shows significant variations over time. Cardiorespiratory interactions through the autonomic nervous system have been suggested to play a role in such variations. Here, we tested whether the spatial distribution associated with the release of the parasympathetic neurotra...
Article
Full-text available
Thoracic Endovascular Aortic Repair (TEVAR) is a minimally invasive technique to treat thoracic aorta pathologies and consists of placing a self-expandable stent-graft into the pathological region to restore the vessel lumen and recreate a more physiological condition. Exhaustive computational models can be implemented to reproduce the clinical pro...
Article
Full-text available
Background and objective: In silico trials aim to speed up the introduction of new devices in clinical practice by testing device design and performance in different patient scenarios and improving patient stratification for optimizing clinical trials. In this paper, we demonstrate an in silico trial framework for thrombectomy treatment of acute i...
Article
Full-text available
Background Intra-arterial thrombectomy is the main treatment for acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusions and can consist in mechanically removing the thrombus with a stent-retriever. A cause of failure of the procedure is the fragmentation of the thrombus and formation of micro-emboli, difficult to remove. This work proposes a methodol...
Article
Background and objective In the last 30 years, a growing interest has involved the study of zebrafish thanks to its physiological characteristics similar to those of humans. The aim of the following work is to create an electrophysiological computational model of the zebrafish heart and lay the foundation for the development of an in-silico model o...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the corneal mechanical properties has great importance in the study of corneal pathologies and the prediction of refractive surgery outcomes. Non-Contact Tonometry (NCT) is a non-invasive diagnostic tool intended to characterize the corneal tissue response in vivo by applying a defined air-pulse. The biomarkers inferred from this test...
Chapter
Atherosclerosis is one of the major causes of death and morbidity in Western countries. It is a chronic inflammatory disease of the arterial wall consisting of the buildup of fatty plaques resulting in narrowing the vessel lumen. Among the multiple biological, systemic, and biomechanical factors influencing the initiation and progression of atheros...
Article
Full-text available
Mechanisms of atrial fibrillation and the susceptibility to reentries can be impacted by the repolarization across the atria. Studies into atrial fibrillation ignore cell-to-cell heterogeneity due to electrotonic coupling. Recent studies show that cellular variability may have a larger impact on electrophysiological behaviour than assumed. This pap...
Article
Full-text available
Background and objective: In silico electrophysiological models are generally validated by comparing simulated results with experimental data. When dealing with single-cell and tissue scales simultaneously, as occurs frequently during model development and calibration, the effects of inter-cellular coupling should be considered to ensure the trust...
Article
Full-text available
Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) treatment of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients typically involves use of stent retrievers or aspiration catheters alone or in combination. For in silico trials of AIS patients, it is crucial to incorporate the possibility of thrombus fragmentation during the intervention. This study focuses on two aspects of the thro...
Article
Full-text available
Thoracic Endovascular Aortic Repair (TEVAR) is the preferred treatment option for thoracic aortic pathologies and consists of inserting a self-expandable stent-graft into the pathological region to restore the lumen. Computational models play a significant role in procedural planning and must be reliable. For this reason, in this work, high-fidelit...
Article
Non-Contact Tonometry (NCT) is a diagnostic tool intended to characterize corneal biomechanics in vivo. In order to analyze the response of the corneal tissue behavior, a numerical model could be of great help. This work aims to validate an in-silico NCT by comparing the clinical biomarkers of four patients to the numerical results of the same pati...
Article
Full-text available
Background The performance of self-expandable stents is being increasingly studied by means of finite-element analysis. As for peripheral stents, transcatheter valves and stent-grafts, there are numerous computational studies for setting up a proper model, this information is missing for stent-retrievers used in the procedure of thrombus removal in...
Article
Background Restenosis following percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) in femoral arteries is a major cause of failure of the revascularization procedure. The arterial wall response to PTA is driven by multifactorial, multiscale processes, whose complete understanding is lacking. Multiscale agent-based modeling frameworks, simulating the netwo...
Article
Full-text available
Background and Objective Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) has become the standard treatment for a wide range of patients with aortic stenosis. Although some of the TAVI post-operative complications are addressed in newer designs, other complications and lack of long-term and durability data on the performance of these prostheses are l...
Article
Full-text available
In-stent restenosis (ISR) is a maladaptive inflammatory-driven response of femoral arteries to percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stent deployment, leading to lumen re-narrowing as consequence of excessive cellular proliferative and synthetic activities. A thorough understanding of the underlying mechanobiological factors contributing to ISR...
Article
Full-text available
Development of in silico models of patient-specific cerebral artery networks presents several significant technical challenges: (i) The resolution and smoothness of medical CT images are much lower than the required element/cell length for FEA/CFD/FSI models; (ii) contact between vessels, and indeed self contact of high tortuosity vessel segments a...
Article
Non Contact Tonometry is a clinical tool that records the displacement of the corneal surface caused by the application of an airflow. The measurements are not true representatives of corneal properties, but they are related. The proposed analysis simulates the test on an eye model to isolate the mechanical properties and establish clinical decisio...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Although percutaneous transluminal angioplasty with stenting is one of the preferred treatments of lower extremity peripheral artery disease, this procedure suffers from a 66% 1-year primary patency rate. The unfavorable outcome is mostly attributable to in-stent restenosis, an inflammatory-driven arterial response, characterized by excessive smoot...
Article
Full-text available
The widespread incidence of cardiovascular diseases and associated mortality and morbidity, along with the advent of powerful computational resources, have fostered an extensive research in computational modeling of vascular pathophysiology field and promoted in-silico models as a support for biomedical research. Given the multiscale nature of biol...
Article
Electrophysiological alterations of the myocardium caused by acute ischemia constitute a pro-arrhythmic substrate for the generation of potentially lethal arrhythmias. Experimental evidence has shown that the main components of acute ischemia that induce these electrophysiological alterations are hyperkalemia, hypoxia (or anoxia in complete artery...
Article
Developing an efficient stent frame for transcatheter aortic valves (TAV) needs thorough investigation in different design and functional aspects. In recent years, most TAV studies have focused on their clinical performance, leaflet design, and durability. Although several optimization studies on peripheral stents exist, the TAV stents have differe...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the zebrafish thanks to its physiological characteristics similar to humans’. The following work aims to create a full electrophysiological computational model of the zebrafish heart with the ultimate purpose of assessing the influence of pathologies and drug administration. The model considers a...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this work is to propose a methodology for identifying relationships between morphological features of the cerebral vasculature and the outcome of in silico simulations of thrombectomy, the mechanical treatment for acute ischemic stroke. Fourteen patient-specific cerebral vasculature segmentations were collected and used for geometric cha...
Article
Full-text available
An in silico trial simulates a disease and its corresponding therapies on a cohort of virtual patients to support the development and evaluation of medical devices, drugs and treatment. in silico trials have the potential to refine, reduce cost, and partially replace current in vivo studies, namely clinical trials and animal testing. We present the...
Article
Full-text available
(1) Background: in silico models are increasingly relied upon to study the mechanisms of atrial fibrillation. Due to the complexity associated with atrial models, cellular variability is often ignored. Recent studies have shown that cellular variability may have a larger impact on electrophysiological behaviour than previously expected. This paper...
Article
Full-text available
Treatment of acute ischemic stroke has been recently improved with the introduction of endovascular mechanical thrombectomy, a minimally invasive procedure able to remove a clot using aspiration devices and/or stent-retrievers. Despite the promising and encouraging results, improvements to the procedure and to the stent design are the focus of the...
Article
Full-text available
Intra-arterial thrombectomy is a minimally invasive procedure in which an obstructing thrombus (clot) is removed using a minimally-invasive device: a stent-retriever. The stent-retriever is first deployed, and then the thrombus is removed during stent-retriever retraction. This procedure can be simulated using a detailed computational model. Howeve...
Article
Full-text available
The bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) is a common and heterogeneous congenital heart abnormality that is often complicated by aortic stenosis. Although initially developed for tricuspid aortic valves (TAV), transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) devices are increasingly applied to the treatment of BAV stenosis. It is known that patient-device rela...
Preprint
Full-text available
Development of in silico models of patient-specific cerebral artery networks presents several significant technical challenges: (i) The resolution and smoothness of medical CT images is much lower than the required element/cell length for FEA/CFD/FSI models; (ii) contact between vessels, and indeed self contact of high tortuosity vessel segments ar...
Article
Smart biomaterials are increasingly being used to control stem cell fate in vitro by the recapitulation of the native niche microenvironment. By integrating experimental measurements with numerical models, we show that in mesenchymal stem cells grown inside a 3D synthetic niche both nuclear transport of a myogenic factor and the passive nuclear dif...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The influence of each ischemic component (hypoxia, hyperkalemia, and acidosis) on arrhythmogenesis is controversial and difficult to study experimentally. In the present study, we investigate how the different ischemic components affect the vulnerable window (VW) for reentry using computational simulations. Simulations were performed in a 3D bivent...
Article
Full-text available
An acute ischaemic stroke appears when a blood clot blocks the blood flow in a cerebral artery. Intra-arterial thrombectomy, a mini-invasive procedure based on stent technology, is a mechanical available treatment to extract the clot and restore the blood circulation. After stent deployment, the clot, trapped in the stent struts, is pulled along wi...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Increasing applications of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) to treat high- or medium-risk patients with aortic diseases have been proposed in recent years. Despite its increasing use, many influential factors are still to be understood. Furthermore, innovative applications of TAVR such as in bicuspid aortic valves or in lo...
Article
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a muscle degenerative disease caused by a mutation in the dystrophin gene. The lack of dystrophin leads to persistent inflammation, degeneration/regeneration cycles of muscle fibers, Ca2+ dysregulation, incompletely regenerated fibers, necrosis, fibrotic tissue replacement, and alterations in the fiber ultrastru...
Article
Full-text available
Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) strongly depends on the calcification patterns, which may lead to a malapposition of the stented valve and complication onsets in terms of structure kinematics and paravalvular leakage (PVL). From one anatomical-resembling model of the aortic root, six configurations with different calcific deposits wer...