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Two of The University of Western Australia's top mechanical engineers have been recognised by Engineers Australia with the Sir George Julius medal for their ground-breaking research into the use of engineering computations in image-guided surgery.

Winthrop Professor Karol Miller and Associate Professor Adam Wittek have been working towards improving clinical outcomes through appropriate use of technology.

"We conduct research in the development and application of methods of computational mechanics and biomechanics for surgery simulation, image-guided surgery, injury prevention, understanding of mechanisms of disease formation and related fields of biomedical engineering," Associate Professor Wittek said.

Their projects are funded by The Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council and other agencies.  Research collaborations have also been established with leading institutions including Harvard Medical School, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and AIST Japan.

The pair were awarded the Sir George Julius Medal for their paper "Patient Specific Model of Brain Deformation: Application to Medical Image Registration" J. Biomechanics vol. 40, pp. 919-929.  It is currently ranked 10 among some 10,000 biomechanics papers published since 2007.

The George Julius Medal is awarded for the paper selected by the Board of the College of Mechanical Engineers as the best in the discipline of mechanical engineering.

Media references

Associate Professor Adam Wittek (UWA School of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering)  (+61 8)  6488 7362
Michael Sinclair-Jones (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 3229  /  (+61 4) 00 700 783