Strokes are one of the primary sources of long-term disability with billions in annual direct and indirect costs to the United States healthcare system. Nearly one-third of all strokes occur in patients with clogged carotid arteries. Carotid artery imaging types include digital subtraction angiography (DSA), duplex ultrasonography (DUS), CT angiography, and MR angiography. These imaging techniques provide information on the carotid artery’s shape, localized blood flow, and plaque composition.

Based on the famous ""mfold"", the UNAFold software package is an integrated collection of programs that simulate nucleic acid folding and hybridization, and its melting pathways for one or two single-stranded molecules. The package predicts folding for single-stranded RNA or DNA through combination of free energy minimization, partition function calculations and stochastic sampling. For melting simulations, the package computes entire melting profiles, not just melting temperatures.