A meshless rheological model for blood-vessel interaction in endovascular simulation

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Medical Simulation

Background:

• Endovascular simulations face challenges with interactive, realistic biomechanical feedback due to complex rheological models.
• Existing methods struggle to accurately represent blood flow and vessel interactions dynamically.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a meshless, particle-based rheological model for virtual catheterization training.
• To enable high-fidelity simulation of blood-vessel interaction and thrombus formation/dissolution.

Main Methods:

• Utilized smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) for non-Newtonian blood flow simulation.
• Employed a Lagrangian particle formulation for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modeling blood-vessel dynamics.
• Developed a flow-related thrombus formation-dissolution model within the FSI framework.
• Implemented a physics processing API (PhysX) for hardware-accelerated computations.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated the feasibility of the meshfree framework for simulating blood-vessel interactions.
• Successfully modeled clotting behaviors essential for endovascular simulations.
• Achieved interactive simulation framerates through hardware acceleration.

Conclusions:

• The proposed meshless rheological model provides a viable solution for realistic endovascular simulations.
• The particle-based FSI approach facilitates interactive training applications with accurate biomechanical feedback.
• This framework supports the simulation of critical phenomena like blood clotting in vascular procedures.