A recent report  released by the US Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) entitled, “Healthy Innovation – Missile Defense Technologies Applied: Medical and Safety Solutions“, highlights how improvements in health care have been spawned in unexpected ways by missile defense technology development. Technologies developed by twenty different companies are highlighted. VEXTEC’s Virtual Life Management^® (VLM^®) technology has been identified as one such technology which has multi-disciplinary application. VLM improves product safety and reliability using computer simulation. The simulation software tools predict damage over time to help engineers build better products. The need for early prediction of product safety exists for many industries, from weapons systems to medical devices.

Several medical device companies such as Boston Scientific have used VLM to simulate bench testing of stents and electrical leads. The medical device market is a demanding commercial market since the reliability of an implanted device can be a life-or-death issue. VLM affords medical device makers the capability to make design decisions before extensive physical testing and prototyping. VLM helps companies reduce the time and cost of product development and certification while supporting the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) goals of getting effective and safe treatments to patients more quickly.

Dr. Tryon, who has spoken at previous medical device conferences, will discuss the use of VEXTEC Virtual Life Management^®(VLM^®) simulation software in determining and improving product reliability. The presentation entitled “Computational Models to Predict the Structural Reliability of Aerospace Systems” will detail three VLM cases from the aerospace industry, which has a similar risk profile to the medical device market.  These examples involve a helicopter turbine wheel, an aircraft engine fan blade, and an auxiliary power unit of a commercial airliner.

The second presentation reflects a technical collaboration with Boston Scientific Corporation, Inc. The presentation, “Using Probabilistic Computational Durability Modeling and Simulation to Create a Virtual Design of Experiments Based on Limited Laboratory Tests”, will be presented by Dr. Sanjeev Kulkarni, R&D Fellow at Boston Scientific. Dr. Kulkarni participated in the collaborative program and applied the results to BSCI products. The presentation covers the use of VLM computational models to accurately simulate statistically large populations of medical devices.

The third VEXTEC presentation will be given by Dr. Animesh Dey who is a recognized expert in the field of Uncertainty Management. Dr. Dey’s presentation entitled “Confidence Estimates Due to Uncertainty in Multi-Disciplinary Computational Analysis”, details methods to propagate and manage the uncertainty in the computational models themselves as well as the data and information used as input into the models.

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