World Heart Day 29/09/2023

World Heart Day is celebrated every year on September 29th with the aim of raising awareness of the need to prevent heart attacks. The theme for 2023 is "Use your heart, know your heart". The more we know about our heart, the better we can take care of it.

This is the aim of the pioneering work of researcher Gonçalo Coutinho, who is developing experimental methods of optical visualization to study the three-dimensional behavior of blood flow cardiovascular flows in in-vitro artificial, physical models of arteries, which may help in the future to prevent deaths from cardiovascular diseases.

"Rigid particles in red blood cell (RBC) flows are forced to migrate to the near-wall region, through a phenomenon known as margination. In this work, we use a 3D particle tracking method to provide an experimentally perspective into the intricate dynamics of synthetic particles within RBC flows and make a significant departure from the simulation-driven research landscape in microcirculation studies, where experimental data has been notably scarce. The experimental results show the critical role of the physical interactions between synthetic particles and RBCs in triggering margination: A phenomenon characterized by speed, irreversibility, and unpredictability."

A scientific article on this innovative technique was recently accepted by the APS journal Physical Review Fluids and will soon be available at this link: https://journals.aps.org/prfluids/accepted/1f07aSe4N701da08919b8222d629b89cbf03c5ec8