Simulation can be the key to understanding complex issues, unlocking medical breakthroughs, and getting the latest advancements to the public faster, safer, and making them more broadly accessible. Altair helps medical companies across the world design better products, improve patient care, and reduce costs with simulation-driven design. Our simulation and optimization tools enable device designers and manufacturers to deliver quality and reliability while meeting regulatory standards, and our data analytics technologies empower healthcare providers to make faster, more informed decisions.
Device manufacturers are required to dedicate large amounts of time and expense to clinical tests to validate safety and performance claims. Simulation can speed up these trials by satisfying the testing of variables virtually. Multiple variants can be efficiently tested at a massive scale without human or animal testing. Replacing even one variable with simulation could mean saving months of testing time and help get products to the market faster than the competition.
Medical and wellness devices must be designed to withstand the structural and operational requirements associated with normal use, sterilization and misuse, all while balancing weight and cost considerations. Market demands for increased functionality, connectivity and miniaturization mean that all devices can benefit from the simulation of multiple physics, enabling optimization for all structural, thermal, electrical, electromagnetic and manufacturing criteria.
Ensuring safe electromagnetic operating conditions is vital as medical products become more connected. It is required that all devices meet radio frequency (RF) exposure standards to avoid adverse health effects. Computer simulations can carry out radiation performance evaluations that consider not just user position, posture, gender, age and height but the power, frequency and interaction of multiple devices.
Life sciences organizations have long depended on Altair computing solutions to manage complex high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in mission-critical fields including healthcare and research. Small organizations and top brands alike manage their HPC with Altair’s trusted workload management tools, along with solutions for HPC admin control, user access, pinpointing I/O bottlenecks, and more. When Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, which has been at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development from the start, needed the right HPC management tools for its cloud-based infrastructure, we upgraded its workload management to Altair® Grid Engine® — well known to integrate with popular life sciences applications — and deployed the latest in cloud management solutions.
In a rapidly shifting and complex industry, understanding the impact of the growing volume and digitization of patient, physician, regulatory, and financial data is crucial to healthcare organizations across the globe. Altair empowers providers, payers, and biopharma to make faster, more informed decisions by transforming disparate data and employing machine learning to maintain costs, improve clinical and financial efficiencies, manage resources and supply chains, and deliver better access to quality patient care.
Altair’s no code, self-service healthcare analytics solutions allow data scientists and operational systems users to optimize decision-making by managing and analyzing relevant clinical, claims, demographic, and revenue-adjacent data. Altair can help healthcare organizations to strategically and rapidly manage resource fluidity and comply with constantly changing regulatory requirements.
For more than 25 years, Altair® OptiStruct® has been the industry leader in developing and applying optimization technology for strong, lightweight designs. Developed to mimic how mechanical stresses influence optimal bone growth, it is now used to model complex biological structures and design optimized orthopedic structures. This includes lattice-designed, 3D printed components, ideal for osseointegration and promoting vascularization.
Patients with specific maladies can now be treated with custom-design implantable structures. Optimized using Altair technology, such replacement devices can be manufactured using 3D-printed resorbable biomaterials and serve as a temporary solution until the body grows its own tissue in replacement.
Melding Optimization with Advanced Manufacturing
Altair simulation technology is widely used in the design of optimized structures in prosthetic and orthotic design, where custom fit is essential to a comfortable supportive structure. Clinicians and engineers have the ability to easily model patient-specific geometry with Altair® HyperMesh®, optimize the shape of the device to achieve the desired load transfer with OptiStruct, and understanding the manufacturing process of polymers with Altair® Inspire™ Mold and Altair® Inspire™ Print3D. This all adds up to custom successful fit for the patient, and ensured function of the device, and ideally a shorter time to wellness.
Whether it’s importing external or internal patient scan data, HyperMesh has been a critical tool used by clinicians and engineers to accurately model the complex geometry of the human body. Once established, this model can then be exercised by a variety of Altair physics solvers and optimization methods to study bodily function and develop ways to improve patient care. For example, using shape optimization and elasto-plastic simulation, Altair can model complex biological systems such as the delicate structural behavior of intravascular stents within blood vessels. Vascular deformation and blood flow analyses can be performed to understand, predict, and prevent disorders.
Such tools are also essential to building accurate models of the 3D shape of the brain, acquired from MRI and CT data. These models help map cerebral vascular networks and diagnose and prevent brain disease. Further, Altair technology has been extensively applied to biomechanics, like studying injury thresholds for brain concussion in automotive safety and other applications within the field of sports medicine.
