Professor Karol Miller

The Engineer Will See You Now: Fixing What Medicine Can't

The University of Western Australia

Karol Miller is a Winthrop Professor of Applied Mechanics at The University of Western Australia. Until 2023 he has been a Visiting Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School.

Karol was born and educated in Warsaw, Poland. He has MSc in aerospace engineering, PhD in robotics and Habilitation (DSc) in biomechanics.
In 2002 Karol established the Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory. ISML’s mission is to work towards improving clinical outcomes through development and appropriate use of technology. It runs exciting research projects funded by the Australian Research

Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia), the National Institute of Health (USA) and other national and international agencies. The overall objective of his research is to help creating methods and tools which will enable a new exciting era of personalised medicine. He is best known for his work on biomechanics of the brain. He is one of the world’s most cited researcher in this area.

Karol’s research and teaching have been recognised by multiple awards, including the Humboldt Research Award, Theodore von Karman Fellowship at RWTH Aachen, NVIDIA GPU Computing Champion Award, the Simulation Industry Association Australia Award, the Sir Charles Julius Medal, the Polish Prime Minister Award, the UWA Faculty
of Engineering Computing and Mathematics Teaching Award and the UWA Student Guild Choice Award.

Karol has been a member of National Health and Medical Research Council panel for medical technology, Australian Research Council College of Experts and Australian Research Council Medical Research Advisory Panel. Karol has served on editorial boards of many journals. He was the Associate Editor of International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering and Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

Abstract

The Engineer Will See You Now: Fixing What Medicine Can’t

Mathematical modelling and computer simulation have proved tremendously successful in engineering. One of the greatest challenges for mechanists is to extend the success of computational mechanics to fields outside traditional engineering, in particular to biology, biomedical sciences and medicine. Over many decades of work in biomechanics for medicine I have come to realise that little progress in effectiveness of management of some diseases may be due to the fact that their understanding needed to choose an optimal treatment option requires mastery of concepts from mechanical, civil, electrical and mechatronic engineering, rather than chemistry, biology and physiology medical professionals are trained in and familiar with. Three examples I will consider today are:

Risk assessment and stratification of patients suffering from abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease [1].
Assessment of physiological significance of coronary artery stenosis [2].
Epileptic seizure onset zone (SOZ) localisation [3]

In my lecture I will attempt to illustrate how fundamental engineering concepts can help in the above cases, potentially leading to better health outcomes and dramatic reduction in costs. I will conclude with suggestions for the future developments in the field and a vision for a new era of personalised medicine based on patient-specific scientific computations.

Keywords: computational science, biomechanics, brain, vascular system

References

Mostafa Jamshidian, Adam Wittek, Saeideh Sekhavat, Hozan Mufty, Geert Maleux, Inge Fourneau, Elke R. Gizewski, Eva Gassner, Alexander Loizides, Maximilian Lutz, Florian K. Enzmann, Donatien Le Liepvre, Florian Bernard, Ludovic Minvielle, Antoine Fondanèche, Karol Miller (2025). Towards personalised assessment of abdominal aortic aneurysm structural integrity. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09905.
Zwick, B. F., Mirota, K., Chojnacki, J., Gajowczyk, M., & Miller, K. (2025). Reliable Computational Fluid Dynamics for Ground Truth Generation for AI-Based Blood Flow Analysis. In: Kobielarz, M., Wittek, A., Nash, M.P., Nielsen, P., Babu, A.R., Miller, K. (eds) Computational Biomechanics for Medicine. MICCAI 2024. Lecture Notes in Bioengineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-94128-3_3
Benjamin F. Zwick, George C. Bourantas, Saima Safdar, Grand R. Joldes, Damon E. Hyde, Simon K. Warfield, Adam Wittek, Karol Miller (2022) “Patient-specific solution of the electrocorticography forward problem in deforming brain”, Neuroimage. 263/119649.

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