BME7900 Seminar: Kristin Myers (Columbia)

Women's Health Engineering: Can Digital Twins Be Used to Better Understand Pregnancy Health?

Pregnancy asks more of the human body than almost any other physiological process. The uterus grows and stretches to accommodate a developing fetus. Meanwhile the cervix, the tissue that holds the pregnancy in place, progressively softens across all nine months. It begins as a mechanical barrier that protects the fetus and becomes a compliant passageway that allows for a safe delivery. When that remodeling happens too early, the result can be preterm birth. Preterm birth affects roughly one in ten pregnancies worldwide and remains the leading cause of death in children under five. Clinicians still have remarkably few tools to predict who is at risk.

This talk introduces Women's Health Engineering, a rapidly expanding field that brings engineering to bear on reproductive health. It asks what a "digital twin" can contribute. Our lab combines routine ultrasound imaging with a new clinical device that measures cervical stiffness. From these measurements we build patient-specific computer models, or digital twins, that calculate the mechanical forces at work inside an individual pregnancy. I will show how these models are being used to assess preterm birth risk and to plan surgical treatment. I will also show how Columbia engineering students contribute to the work.

Bio: Kristin Myers is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. Her current obstetrics research is done in tight collaboration with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Her work utilizes experimental, theoretical, and computational biomechanics to calculate and study the physiology of pregnancy and postpartum recovery. Her work aims to uncover the structural antecedents of preterm birth to design and invent new diagnostic and therapeutic clinical tools. Dr. Myers’s lab holds the largest published library of biomechanical data and models of human pregnancy, focused on cervical and uterine properties, geared for clinical translation. She received her mechanical engineering doctorate and master’s degree from MIT and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. In 2019 Kristin was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House for her work in understanding tissue growth and remodeling in pregnancy.