PARALLELS BETWEEN PUMPING BLOOD, OIL FOCUS OF CONFERENCE

ExxonMobil, Methodist DeBakey Heart Center, UH Team Up to Explore Shared Technologies

Much like moving oil through a pipeline, the heart must pump blood through the body.  In a collaborative effort between Houston’s largest industries, an event bringing together petroleum, medical and imaging experts explored potential crossover ideas and extracted shared technologies useful to each industry. 

Sponsored by ExxonMobil, the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center of The Methodist Hospital and the University of Houston, the “Pumps & Pipes I” conference was held at UH’s Texas Learning and Computation Center in November. 

The presentations and discussions explored issues common to the medical and oil and gas industries, discussing cross-over ideas and shared technologies.  The goal of the conference was to stimulate dialogue among relevant, actively-engaged participants in the medical and oil fields.  This first edition of the conference and subsequent installments are expected to lead to the formulation of new ideas and the sharing of new technologies between these industries that face similar challenges, even if on different scales. 

This by-invitation-only event provided common language and terminology to all parties, as well as provided a platform to discuss the hurdles facing each discipline.  Talks focused on anatomy, pathophysiology, how the petroleum industry maintains flow in the pipeline infrastructure, and other topics with potential crossover.  The audience included researchers from medical device manufacturers, computer scientists, imaging specialists, physicists and engineers from academia; geologists, physicists and researchers from the oil and gas industry; and vascular biologists, researchers and clinicians interested in cardiovascular disease. 

“This meeting was not limited to the hydraulics of the heart and of oil pumps and pipes,” said Dr. Alan B. Lumsden, Professor of Surgery at the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center, who conceived the idea for the conference.  “It had a broader perspective such as imaging of pumps and pipes of all sorts, as well as understanding the mechanics involved in their evolution and gradual degradation.  Our intent was to stimulate new avenues for research and collaboration with this gathering.” 

Program directors from the co-hosting organizations were Ioannis Kakadiaris, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at UH, and Bill E. Kline, Manager of the Wells and Materials Division at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company.  All three – Lumsden, Kakadiaris and Kline – were among more than 20 presenters with topics that included the areas of hydraulics, conduits and pumps, accessing targets, and imaging and monitoring. 

In addition to presenting his own research in medical image computing during one of the afternoon sessions, Kakadiaris gave an overview of the competencies of the UH Biomedical Cluster.  Lumsden and Kline kicked off the event with a discussion titled “Docs and Rocks,” with Lumsden addressing the anatomy and physiology of the cardiovascular system followed by Kline talking about the geology and physics of hydrocarbon production. 

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