SurgBioMech Lab

Surgery is anatomy. Anatomy is geometry. Geometry is the heart of mechanics.

SurgBioMech Lab studies the geometry and biomechanics of surgical anatomies and biological interfaces.

The SurgBioMech Lab is run by Dr. Luka Pocivavsek and Dr. Nhung Nguyen in the Department of Surgery. It is an interdisciplinary lab that combines the physical sciences, engineering, and medicine. We apply principles from differential geometry and mechanics to understand aortic pathology, stability and failure of endovascular repairs, stress focusing phenomena induced by surgical interventions, and interfacial adhesion, surface renewal, and topography. We utilize advanced computational methods to extract and define geometric feature spaces that can be linked to mechanical instabilities from patient derived data; finite element methods to model a variety of complex systems, geometries, and materials under different loading conditions; computational fluid dynamics to study stability of seal zones with flow; micro-computed tomography to detect the underlying fiber-reinforced structures of tissues; x-ray scattering techniques to probe the structure and interactions of cell monolayers on solid substrates; and Langmuir monolayers to study the wrinkling, folding, and collapse behaviors of films at air/water interfaces.