Fluid dynamics of the human nose where surgery meets flow control

Abstract: The airflow in the nose is a challenging fluid dynamical problem, with major importance in terms of incidence of pathologies and social impact. Breathing has a rich flow physics, and takes place in an intricate anatomy, with huge inter-subject variations; the concept of a “functionally normal nose” remains elusive.

In this talk, we will first describe the problem and its medical, social and economical relevance, and provide a broad overview of the range of activities of the OpenNOSE workgroup, which has a strong clinical focus. In a second part, we will describe two specific aspects, namely the dedicated CFD tools we are developing, and a ML-based approach designed to classify nasal pathologies. Here, CFD is used to provide informative features to the classification network, and computational geometry techniques are exploited to provide realistic and clearly defined labels.

Bio: Maurizio Quadrio, PhD, is Professor of Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence at Politecnico di Milano. In his research he combines simulations and experiments to study wall-bounded turbulent flows, with a focus on turbulent skin-friction drag reduction. He is also interested in the airflow within the human nasal cavities, to understand how it relates to an healthy breathing, and to design optimal surgeries.