Towards an understanding of the chemo-mechanical influences on kidney stone failure via the material point method

Abstract

This paper explores the use of the meshfree computational mechanics method, the Material Point Method (MPM), to model the composition and damage of typical renal calculi, or kidney stones. Kidney stones are difficult entities to model due to their complex structure and failure behavior. Better understanding of how these stones behave when they are broken apart is a vital piece of knowledge to medical professionals whose aim is to remove these stone by breaking them within a patient’s body. While the properties of individual stones are varied, the common elements and proportions are used to generate synthetic stones that are then placed in a digital experiment to observe their failure patterns. First a more traditional engineering model of a Brazil test is used to create a tensile fracture within the center of these stones to observe the effect of stone consistency on failure behavior. Next a novel application of MPM is applied which relies on an ultrasonic wave being carried by surrounding fluid to model the ultrasonic treatment of stones commonly used by medical practitioners. This numerical modeling of Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL) reveals how these different stones failure in a more real-world situation and could be used to guide further research in this field for safer and more effective treatments.

Applying physics-based loss functions to neural networks for improved generalizability in mechanics problems

“…Only within the bounds of the data used to train the model can a network be relied upon to provide any useful information. Even within these bounds though, there has already been a number of useful applications of deep learning in the physical sciences [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] and this manner of application will continue to develop as more data is generated for scientific purposes. Relying on a data-driven model to provide mechanistic predictions though, creates a number of problems.…”