COMSOL Day: MedTech
See what is possible with multiphysics modeling
By enabling users to understand, design, and optimize medical devices and processes, modeling and simulation can address important issues in the field of medical technology such as patient safety, product quality, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance. The COMSOL Multiphysics® software offers modeling interfaces for a wide array of phenomena, including fluid flow, chemical reactions, electromagnetic fields, acoustics, and heat transfer in solids and biological tissues, which allows for precise virtual prototyping — essential for a comprehensive understanding of the involved physics and interactions.
COMSOL Multiphysics® also features tools like the Application Builder and the Model Manager for facilitating collaboration among a diverse group of scientists and engineers through models and simulation apps.
Join us online for COMSOL Day: MedTech to learn how multiphysics simulations can efficiently optimize design and R&D in medical technology. Keynote speakers will share their experiences integrating modeling and simulation into their projects, and COMSOL engineers will highlight key software features for analyzing medical devices and processes.
Schedule
Modeling and simulation is playing an increasingly important role in the medical device industry, helping organizations reduce physical prototyping, limit animal testing, and shorten development cycles. As simulation becomes more central to device design and regulatory submissions, establishing the credibility of computational models remains a challenge. The COMSOL Multiphysics® software provides a comprehensive environment for building and validating multiphysics models relevant to medical technologies.
Join this session to learn how multiphysics simulation can support credible modeling and help advance safer, more innovative medical technologies. We will present verification and validation (V&V) examples spanning several physics areas, including electromagnetic heating, fluid–structure interaction, and transport phenomena. In addition, we will showcase studies that illustrate how modeling and simulation is applied in practice.
Matthew A. Reilly, PhD, The Ohio State University
The ocular lens is the pivotal organ involved in the process of accommodation — the eye’s ability to dynamically alter its focal length from far to near. This ability is lost with age (presbyopia) as the lens’ shape changes due to continuous growth and changes in biomechanical properties, thereby decreasing its maximum optical power. The shape of the lens is dictated by the balance of residual forces between the lens’ fiber cells and the lens capsule; however, these residual stresses have never been characterized.
In this keynote talk, Matthew A. Reilly will discuss how he and his team combined photogrammetry with iterative computational biomechanical analysis to estimate these residual stresses in the young porcine lens. In future work, they will extend this approach to clarify how these residual stresses evolve with age in the human lens, leading to presbyopia.
CFD simulation is a powerful tool in the development of medical technology, enabling virtual prototyping and deeper insight into the transport processes that determine device performance.
COMSOL Multiphysics® and its add-on products offer a broad set of modeling features for simulating CFD, polymer flow, species transport, porous media flow, and microfluidics. The software's diverse capabilities are well suited for the wide range of biomedical applications, including blood pumps and blood vessels, biochemical sensors and diagnostic tests, lab-on-a-chip systems, and drug delivery devices.
In this session, we will demonstrate how to model transport-driven medical and biomedical devices using COMSOL Multiphysics® and highlight multiphysics workflows relevant to both sensor performance and CFD-based design and analysis.
Medical technology development increasingly relies on complex 3D geometries originating from medical imaging, 3D scanning, and CAD design. In many cases, STL-based anatomical models and CAD-based device or implant components need to be combined to build simulation-ready digital prototypes.
The COMSOL Multiphysics® software supports importing STL and CAD files, repairing and editing surface meshes, and forming watertight computational domains suitable for meshing and multiphysics simulation. This support includes tools for identifying and repairing defects such as holes and intersecting elements, repositioning and uniting multiple imported parts, resolving gaps and overlaps, and generating high-quality volume meshes from repaired surface meshes. The software also enables combining imported mesh-based anatomy with parameterized CAD or geometry created directly in COMSOL, making it possible to integrate implants and medical devices into patient-specific models and perform design studies.
This session gives an overview of the functionality used for importing, repairing, and combining STL and CAD models for applications within medical technology.
Dennis Parsons, Medtronic
The field of medical technology design has evolved to the point where computational modeling and simulation is now seen as an essential tool. It helps engineers understand system behavior, optimize device designs, and solve manufacturing challenges. Numerous success stories have also shown corporate leadership the financial advantages of integrating modeling and simulation into product development.
In this keynote talk, Dennis Parsons will highlight several case studies illustrating how he has used COMSOL Multiphysics® to tackle a range of challenges in recent projects. These examples include routine design evaluations, detailed system-level analyses, and the introduction of multiphysics simulation techniques to engineers early in their careers. Through these specific cases, he will underscore the timeless engineering principle: “If you can’t model something, you don’t fully understand it.”
The use of modeling and simulation is essential in the development of minimally invasive therapies and procedures for analyzing heat generation in biological tissues. By incorporating thermal damage models, engineers and scientists can evaluate the efficacy and safety of clinical procedures, such as MRI examinations, and gain valuable insights into emerging technologies, such as pulsed field ablation. Moreover, as the use of implanted medical devices continues to grow, predicting and minimizing MRI-induced heating near implanted devices remains an important safety consideration.
Join this session for an in-depth look at how COMSOL Multiphysics® can be used to implement an ASTM standard for assessing RF-induced heating in the vicinity of implants during MRI. We will also cover ablation procedures and discuss the capabilities in COMSOL Multiphysics® for modeling the electromagnetic properties of biological tissues and cell membrane electroporation, both of which are critical to the development of pulsed field ablation technologies.
Marcela Mercado Montoya, IN SILICO STEM S.A.S
Medical device R&D for pulsed field ablation (PFA) and other ablation technologies has historically been hindered by expensive, time-consuming bench testing, animal and clinical trials, and stringent regulatory pathways. Despite these exhaustive efforts, optimizing device safety and clinical efficacy remains a complex challenge.
ABLATIA is developing cloud-based COMSOL apps designed to break this bottleneck. Built using the COMSOL Multiphysics® platform, ABLATIA aims to package nearly a decade of refined electrothermal and tissue damage models for ablation technologies into an accessible, scalable virtual environment.
In this keynote talk, Marcela Mercado Montoya will introduce the ABLATIA architecture and demonstrate her company's foundational application: high-fidelity in silico catheter testing within a blood and tissue phantom environment. She will walk through the ABLATIA workflow — from system configuration to automated FDA-guided reporting — and showcase how this validated core serves as the springboard for its expansion roadmap.
Montoya will show the vision for ABLATIA’s growth into advanced tissue phantoms, realistic heart morphophysiologies, and eventually, full in silico clinical trials. She will discuss ABLATIA’s rigorous approach to assessing model credibility using ASME V&V 40 standards and its roadmap toward FDA Medical Device Development Tools (MDDT) qualification.
Modeling and simulation can be used to design and optimize medical devices involving acoustics and vibrations, as well as to support the regulatory approval process for new medical devices and treatments. For biomedical ultrasound technologies, well-established modeling practices exist for studying both diagnostic and therapeutic applications, such as real-time imaging, targeted drug delivery, and tumor ablation.
In this session, we will review the ultrasound modeling capabilities in COMSOL Multiphysics®, beginning with a piezoelectric transducer array for diagnostic imaging. We will then cover therapeutic applications of focused ultrasound for tissue heating, including an uncertainty quantification (UQ) example using an FDA-approved tissue-mimicking material. In addition, we will go over nonlinear ultrasound modeling approaches for high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) propagation through a tissue phantom, including the resulting tissue heating.
Register for COMSOL Day: MedTech
To register for the event, please create a new account or log into your existing account. You will need a COMSOL Access account to attend COMSOL Day: MedTech.
For registration questions or more information contact info@comsol.com.
COMSOL Day Details
May 28, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. EDT (UTC-04:00)
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Matthew Reilly completed a BS in chemical and materials engineering at the University of Dayton in 2003, where he conducted research in the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Materials Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He then developed a telemetric real-time water quality monitoring station at the City of Dayton Wastewater Treatment Plant while earning his MS in chemical and materials engineering at the University of Dayton in 2004.
Reilly went on to earn a PhD in chemical engineering at Washington University in 2008. He then completed postdoctoral training in biomechanics and ophthalmology at the Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis VA Medical Center until 2011, when he joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Most recently, he joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at The Ohio State University in January 2016.
Marcela Mercado Montoya is the cofounder and CEO of IN SILICO STEM. She leverages over a decade of expertise in modeling with COMSOL Multiphysics®, specifically in electromagnetics and transport phenomena. A recognized specialist in ablation technologies, she has authored numerous publications demonstrating how simulation can rigorously evaluate device safety and effectiveness.
Her passion for innovation led to the creation of ABLATIA, a specialized COMSOL app designed to democratize simulation for innovators and researchers. By enabling rapid testing iterations and automatic reports, ABLATIA helps innovators de-risk regulatory pathways and secure early-stage investment. As a dedicated animal lover, Montoya’s work is driven by the mission to reduce and refine animal trials through the power of high-fidelity virtual prototyping.
