This January the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and ANSYS, Inc. signed a collaboration agreement, an extension of a previous research agreement. The primary proponent is Prof. Alejandro Frangi as Dean of the Escola Superior Politècnica (ESUP-UPF).

ANSYS will provide simulation software licenses to fully equip a 25-workstation computer laboratory so that its engineering simulation software will be available for use by UPF undergraduate students in the context of the new Biomedical Engineering degree, to be started in the academic course 2012-2012.

Cutting-edge simulation technology for Biomedical Engineering

The UPF's new Biomedical Engineering degree is a joint venture between the Facultat de Ciències de la Salut i de la Vida and the  Escola Superior Politècnica at the UPF. This new degree bridges the gap between life and health sciences and engineering. The UPF's Biomedical Engineering degree has a clear computational science bias and draws from engineering disciplines such as computer science, and electrical and mechanical engineering. In this context, the ANSYS solvers for computational biomechanics will be available to aid in solving physical equations in fluid dynamics, continuous mechanics, electromagnetism, and material science problems. Access to these software packages will allow practicums to be set up for courses such as Electromagnetism, Biomechanics, Biomaterials, Biomedical devices, Organ modeling etc.

Building on a fruitful research collaboration

The UPF and ANSYS research collaboration began in 2006, in the context of the @neurIST FP6 project (), also as a result of collaboration with Prof. Frangi as director of the Center for Computational Imaging and Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine (CISTIB).

Until now the collaboration was based on research into patient-specific blood flow simulation on cerebral aneurysms and related biomedical areas. The software was used for the analysis of aneurysms in several hundreds of patients over the course of @neurIST and to build up databases of results for data mining.  A significant part of this work was undertaken by the UPF. The software was also used for the simulation of endovascular treatment with stents and coils in cerebral aneurysms, allowing assessment of patient-specific treatment effects

This collaboration was initially limited to the use of ANSYS software for the duration of the @neurIST project. Due to the success of this relationship, this collaboration was extended further than the duration and scope of the project until the present day and has now been extended for educational use within the UPF.

ANSYS is recognized as the leading technology for simulation in many fields of engineering, among them, Biomedical Engineering. ANSYS offers a comprehensive range of engineering simulation solution sets providing access to virtually any field of engineering simulation required by the design process. The simulation solutions from ANSYS provide universities, research institutions and industry the means for advanced multiphysics modelling. This software can import complex biological geometries, model complex physics interactions and perform automatic design exploration analysis, all within a single simulation environment.