Past

An integral part of the brain is a fluid flow system that is separate from brain tissue and the cerebral blood flow system: cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is produced near the centre of the brain, flows out and around the brain, including around the spinal cord and is absorbed primarily in a region between the brain tissue and the skull. Hydrocephalus covers a broad range of anomalous flow and pressure situations: the normal flow path can become blocked, other problems can occur which result in abnormal tissue deformation or pressure changes. This talk will describe work that treats brain tissue as a poroelastic matrix through which the CSF can move when normal flow paths are blocked, producing tissue deformation and pressure changes. We have a number of models, the simplest treating the brain and CSF flow as having spherial symmetry ranging to more complex, fully three-dimensional computations. As well as considering acute hydrocephalus, we touch on normal pressure hydrocephalus, idiopathic intracranial hypertension and simulation of an infusion test. The numerical methods used are a combination of finite difference and finite element techniques applied to an interesting set of hydro-elastic equations.

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In this talk, we report on recent activities in the development of automatic differentiation tools for Matlab and CapeML, a common intermediate language for process control, and highlight some recent AD applications. Lastly, we show the potential for parallelisation created by AD and comment on the impact on scientific computing due to emerging multicore chips which are providing substantial thread-based parallelism in a "pizza box" form factor.