International Biofluid Mechanics Symposium: Position Papers and Key Challenges

On December 12–14, 2003, an International Biofluid Mechanics Symposium was held in Pasadena, California, under the auspices of the US National Committee on Biomechanics (USNCB), the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE). One of the main objectives of the Symposium was to review major milestones that were achieved in the past decade and to define the so-called “show-stoppers” in reaching a comprehensive understanding of bio-fluid mechanics and cardiovascular hemodynamics from cell to organs. In this respect, we face major challenges in defining critical questions and identifying tools that are required to answer these questions. We see the next decade dominated by SYNTHESIS. We now have gone to the “ground zero” of the biology, and are being able to understand individual proteins docking to create new structures, new reactions, and new biological states. The current successes are small, but the future is clear. This involves an enormous amount of first-principles physics as well as integrative fluid mechanics. Coming at these problems from the perspective of continuum mechanics, we have the advantage of knowing how to synthesize these problems and move from angstroms to nanometers to micrometers and cell dimensions, and finally to organs. The relationships between blood flow, mechanotransduction, and the localization of arterial lesions can now be advanced by the incorporation of new technologies and the refinement of existing methods in imaging modalities, computational modeling, and high throughput genomics and proteomics