"Towards a Human Physiological Digital Twin with the Pulse Physiology Engine" with Rachel Clipp, Assistant Director of Medical Computing, Kitware, Inc.
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🧬 UVA Biomedical Engineering Seminar Series
Featured Speaker: Rachel Clipp, PhD
Assistant Director of Medical Computing
Kitware, Inc.
📅 Event Details
- Date: Friday, November 7, 2025
- Location: BME Lecture Hall, MR5 1041
- Time: 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM
- 1:45 PM – Refreshments
- 2:00 PM – Presentation
- 3:00 PM – Meet the Speaker
🔬 SEMINAR: "Towards a Human Physiological Digital Twin with the Pulse Physiology Engine"
The Pulse Physiology Engine is an open source computational physiology engine. It was originally developed to provide accurate and consistent patient physiological data to medical simulation and training products. This provided the opportunity to increase realism and improve consistency across instructors and institutions.
Pulse has been further developed to implement and integrate multiscale models for an individualized whole-body predictive patient physiology model. The engine originally incorporated existing and novel models of organs and physiological systems into a whole-body model of a single generic individual within a reference population.
We have recently improved patient-specificity by incorporating patient-specific parameters needed to create a digital twin. These parameters are used to modify baseline model parameters to achieve the physiological responses and homeostatic state for the specified patient.
Recent work has created populations with demographics and injuries corresponding to specific communities. This synthetic population is then used to develop, train, and validate algorithms for clinical decision support.
The goal of this presentation is to share the core modeling mechanisms in the Pulse Physiology Engine (https://pulse.kitware.com/) and the progress towards a human physiological digital twin.
👩🔬 About the Speaker
Rachel Clipp, Ph.D., is a medical computing expert on Kitware’s Medical Computing Team located in Carrboro, North Carolina. She conducts research in computational modeling and applies these solutions to biomedical problems. Rachel leads medical modeling and simulation projects at Kitware, including those that involve the open source Pulse Physiology Engine. She also leads computational modeling projects using Lattice Boltzmann Methods and artificial intelligence models that represent outcomes from high-fidelity physics-based models and to predict life-saving interventions. She is funded by projects from the NIH, DARPA, DoD, and industry partners. Under Rachel’s guidance, Pulse has been successfully incorporated in commercial and government-funded products and programs. The Pulse team has addressed the needs of the military for virtual medical simulation through collaborations with Exonicus to develop the Trauma Simulator and SimQuest and BioMojo to contribute to the Modeling and Simulation Training Architecture. They have also collaborated with academic and clinical institutions to test medical device algorithms with a closed-loop physiology management system