In many ways, research into pregnancy and childbirth—and corresponding advances in clinical practice—is several decades behind most other specialisms within medicine. In order to influence clinical practice, tools must be developed that allow for experimentation in silico (i.e. with computer models) so as to avoid the ethical problems of conducting research on pregnant patients. It is well established that poor development of the placenta can lead to poor outcomes with the fetus, particularly related to intrauterine growth restriction, but the mechanism is poorly understood. The project proposed here is a small component of a larger effort to develop a multi-scale virtual model of the normal and abnormal human placenta. This will allow for correlation of measured large-scale phenomena, such as blood flow in the umbilical cord, with microscopic phenomena. In particular, the microscopic phenomenon of interest is the blood flow and oxygen exchange at the very smallest subunits of the placenta, the chorionic villi (see image below). This specific component of the overall project examines chorionic villous structure in normal and in pathological placentae to develop quantitative computational models of oxygenation based on the micro-scale anatomical data.
A confocal image of a chorionic villous. The tissue surface marker is labelled red, the capillary surface is labelled green and the cell nuclei are labelled blue.
| Dr. Michelle Oyen |
Department of Engineering |
| Prof. Steve Charnock-Jones |
Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology |
