Presentation by Dr. Jingchao Sun, R&D Senior Director at iLittleMiracle as part of Altair's Future.Industry 2024 conference.

Nowadays, orthodontists need to utilize digital tools to develop appropriate treatment plans for patients. Under the existing traditional techniques, it is difficult to predict the forces within the oral cavity and can only observe the outcomes. Clearly, this imposes numerous constraints on orthodontists. iLittleMiracle(iLM), however, employs the Altair Radioss solver to offer biomechanical simulations for each kid's every treatment stage, enabling orthodontists to analyze and anticipate the forces within the oral cavity. Consequently, orthodontists can combine their clinical experience and choose more rational treatment plans. Building upon this foundation, RomuTech utilizes the Radioss simulation results as an effective training dataset for data analytics machine learning. By integrating the advantages of high precision and efficient predictability, iLM provides orthodontists with reliable, efficient, and visualized digital tools. This marks the first application of digital twin technology in the field of dentistry, addressing industry pain points and leading the way into a new era of digital delivery.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the entire planet, and researchers continue to investigate its catalyst: the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants. Discovering variants of concern (VOCs) quickly can save lives by giving scientists time to develop effective vaccines and treatments — but existing variant-tracking methods can be slow. A team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, along with university and industry collaborators, tackled the problem of tracking virus variants by using artificial intelligence (AI). The powerful Polaris supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), which is enabling science in the runup to the Aurora exascale system, enabled the research with help from Cerebras' AI-hardware accelerator and NVIDIA's GPU-accelerated Selene system. Polaris is equipped with GPUs and with workload orchestration by Altair® PBS Professional®. The project team won the ACM's prestigious 2022 Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research. The results the Argonne researchers and their collaborators have achieved paves the way for faster, more detailed insight into the virus mutation process, enabling scientists to act on emergent variants and develop ammunition to reduce severity and slow the spread, ultimately saving lives.

Medtronic designs and manufacturers medical devices used the world over. Traditionally, computer aided engineering (CAE) and virtual simulation were not fully utilized within the industry as the verification process for often microscopic components was too slow. When designing a new medical stent (an expandable mesh inserted into a patient's artery to keep it open) Medtronic wanted to improve the design and speed up the validation process. Altair ProductDesign worked closely with Medtronic’s own engineers to optimize the performance of the new stent.

The use of digital twins for virtual process optimization is a key component of the digital transformation strategy in the pharmaceutical industry, but their development and deployment require the combined use of a wide range of technologies such as physics-based simulation, machine learning, high-performance computing, real-time dashboarding and IoT. Altair is uniquely positioned to deliver an end-to-end solution in this context.