PhD Digital twin of cardiovascular diseases - ANR DigiTAD (M/F)

Job Description

Thesis Subject

Background : Responsible for almost 18 million deaths each year, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. Among these pathologies, we are interested in aortic dissections (AD) that consists of an intimal tear in the aortic wall, called a portal vein, responsible for the creation of a false circulatory channel. The true and false channels are separated by the dissected wall, called neointimal flap and the false lumen may contain a thrombus. (blood aggregates).
From a mechanical point of view, vascular walls exhibit essentially nonlinear, anisotropic, and heteroge-neous behavior; the thrombus is considered a deformable porous material with a permeability gradient; and, given the geometric characteristics of the DATs, the blood's shear thinning properties must be modeled.
It is now well known that there are correlations between the geometries representing the pathological aortas, the fluid dynamics within these geometries, the mechanical characteristics of the structures in-volved and the evolution of the pathologies. Thus, biomimetic numerical models, i.e models that take into account the morphological, fluid, and structural characteristics of patients with this condition can provide key indicators for the early prediction of a patient's prognosis.
PhD projet : Based on the numerous works already done in the host team ((1), 2), 3), 4), 5), 6), 7)), the objective of this PhD project will be to perform biomimetic numerical modelling of aneurysmal diseases which will then be used to implement deep learning approaches (8) to identify new morpho-hydro-elastodynamic markers capable of rapidly predicting an unfavourable evolution at an early stage of the disease's development.

References
1) Loffredo, S., Guivier-Curien, C., Deplano, V. 2021. Influence of the presence of a porous thrombus on hemodynamics in a CFD model of a descending thoracic aneurysm. Computer Methods in Biome-chanics and Biomedical Engineering, 24(1), 189-191
2) Khannous, F., Guivier-Curien C., Gaudry, M., Piquet Ph., Deplano, V. (2022). Numerical modeling of residual type B aortic dissection: longitudinal analysis of favorable and unfavorable evolution. Medi-cal and Biological Engineering and Computing, 60(3):769-783, DOI: 10.1007/s11517-021-02480-1
3) Deplano, V. and Guivier-Curien, C. (2022). Geometric vascular singularities, hemodynamic markers and pathologies (Chapter 3), in Biological flow in large vessels; Dialog between numerical modeling and in vitro/in vivo experiment, Edition ISTE-WILEY https://www.iste.co.uk/book.php?id=1883
4) Deplano, V., Guivier-Curien, C. 2023. Fluid Structure interaction in aortic dissections, Chapter 24 in BIOMECHANICS OF THE AORTA: MODELLING FOR PATIENT CARE, Elsevier Textbook
5) Guivier-Curien C., Deplano, V. (2025) A Fluid–Structure Interaction Computational Study of Residual Aortic Dissection to Investigate the Influence of Mechanical Behaviour of Wall and Flap on Flows. In-ternational Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 41
6) Baudouard, M., Guivier-Curien, C., Rapacchi, S., Jacquier, A., Deplano, V. 2025. Assessing the dis-placement of thoracic aortic aneurysms with magnetic resonance imaging for a biomimetic numeri-cal modeling. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6157089/v1 Preprint in research square.
7) Léonet, J., Vicente, J., D Masi, M., Deplano, V. 2025. Aortic thrombi microstructure through con-trast-enhanced X-ray microtomography. Scientific Reports, 15:11808, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-95724-1
8) Cruz-Gonzalez, O.L., Deplano, V., Ghattas, B., 2026. Enhanced Vascular Flow Simulations in Aortic Aneurysm via Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Deep Operator Networks. Mechanics Research Communications. Volume 153, April 2026, 104642.

Your Work Environment

Host Laboratory : Institute for Research on Non-Equilibrium Phenomena, UMR7342, Marseille (IRPHé) is a joint laboratory of the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University (amU), and Centrale Méditerranée, affiliated with the CNRS Institute of Engineering. This PhD will be conducted within the biomechanics team at IRPhé as part of the ANR DigiTAD grant awarded in July 2025. DigiTAD is a consortium comprising the vascular surgery and medical imaging departments at Hôpital de la Timone, the Center for Magnetic Resonance in Biology and Medicine (CRMBM), UMR7339, Marseille, the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE), UMR7316, and the Dijon University Hospital (CHU).
Scientific Heads : Valérie Deplano, CNRS Research Director, will be the director of this doctoral project, and Carine Guivier Curien, amU Professor, will co-direct the research. Both are developing experimental and numerical biomimetic models of cardiovascular diseases. The major theme of their research is to correlate the dynamics of fluids and biological structures with clinical events

Compensation and benefits

Compensation

2300 € gross monthly

Annual leave and RTT

44 jours

Remote Working practice and compensation

Pratique et indemnisation du TT

Transport

Prise en charge à 75% du coût et forfait mobilité durable jusqu’à 300€

About the offer

About the CNRS

The CNRS is a major player in fundamental research on a global scale. The CNRS is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist allows it to bring together different disciplines to address the most important challenges of the contemporary world, in connection with the actors of change.

CNRS

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