Simulating The Motions Of Guidewire And Catheter In Interventional Radiology

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of deaths worldwide and has become a majorpublic health problem. Interventional radiology is one of the most effective treatments forcardiovascular disease. In an interventional procedure, the doctor manipulates the guidewire inthree dimensional space based on real time scanned two-dimensional images, which requiresaccurate and efficient hand-eye coordination ability and strict pre-surgery training.Consequently, it takes a long time to train a qualified interventional radiologist.The traditional surgical training methods have their shortcomings, such as long timetraining period, high cost, high risk and low replicability. With the development of computertechnology and minimally invasive surgery, virtual surgery has been playing a more and moreimportant role in medical field. Interventional surgical simulation training system based onvirtual reality provides an ideal solution to overcome the shortcomings of traditional trainingmethods. The simulation of guidewire and catheter is one of the most important of in virtualinterventional radiology.In our study, we proposed a physical-based deformation method for guidewire andcatheter. The guidewire is modeled as a set of jointed rigid rods. By employing a dynamicaladaptive discretization strategy, our method performs robustly in various vascular models withvastly varied geometry structure. Our method is more robust compared with previous methods.By integrating many material characteristics in the model, the virtual guidewire acts moreclosely to the real one and the accuracy could meet the clinical requirement. Besides, weproposed a force correction strategy to dynamically adjust the elastic force, resulting inreducing the heavy computational burden and saving a great amount of time.The experimental results indicate that our method not only meets the requirement of realtime in interventional simulation, but also has great robustness and high accuracy. Based on ourmethod, we have developed a cardiovascular interventional simulator which is integrated withmany immersion enhancement modules.