Newswise — Much like moving oil through a pipeline, the heart must pump blood through the body. In a collaborative effort between Houston's largest industries, an event bringing together petroleum, medical and imaging experts will explore potential crossover ideas and extract shared technologies useful to each industry.
The Pumps & Pipes conference, sponsored by the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center, ExxonMobil and the University of Houston, will be held at University of Houston campus from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday, Nov. 12.
The presentations and discussions will explore issues common to the medical and oil and gas industries. The goal of the conference is to stimulate dialogue among participants in the medical and oil fields, leading to the formulation of new ideas and the sharing of new technologies between these industries that face similar challenges, even if on different scales.
Pumps & Pipes will provide common language and terminology to all parties, as well as provide a platform to discuss the hurdles facing each discipline. Talks will focus on anatomy, pathophysiology, how the petroleum industry maintains flow in the pipeline infrastructure, and other topics with potential crossover. The audience will include researchers from medical device manufacturers, computer scientists, imaging specialists, physicists and engineers from academia; geologists, physicists and researchers from the oil and gas industry; and vascular biologists, researchers and physicians interested in cardiovascular disease.
"This meeting is not limited to the hydraulics of the heart and of oil pumps and pipes," said Dr. Alan B. Lumsden, vascular surgeon at the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center, who conceived the idea for the conference. "It has a broader perspective such as imaging of pumps and pipes of all sorts, as well as understanding the mechanics involved in their evolution and gradual degradation. We hope to stimulate new avenues for research and collaboration with this gathering."
Program directors from the co-hosting organizations are Lumsden, Ioannis Kakadiaris, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at UH, and Bill E. Kline, Manager of the Wells and Materials Division at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company. All three will be among more than 20 presenters with topics that include the areas of hydraulics, conduits and pumps, accessing targets, and imaging and monitoring.
After Mayor Bill White kicks off the day's activities, Lumsden and Kline will begin the sessions with a discussion titled "Docs and Rocks," with Lumsden addressing the anatomy and physiology of the cardiovascular system followed by Kline talking about the geology and physics of hydrocarbon production. Kakadiaris will give an overview of the UH Biomedical Cluster and will present his own research in medical image computing during one of the afternoon sessions.
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