Efficient angiography simulation for complex vessels

Abstract

Angiography simulation is a critical step in virtual interventional surgery. However, the blood vessels are always complex and irregular, which poses a significant challenge to the accuracy and efficiency of simulation. In this paper, we present a novel method to simulate contrast media propagation, which can efficiently and accurately deal with various complex vascular structures and the coupling between blood and contrast media. Our method represents the vascular structures by signed distance functions and to impose boundary conditions, and then we compute the boundary volume by Gauss-Kronrod quadrature, which yields more accurate results even in complex vessels. Furthermore, we improve the simulation's initialization efficiency and real-time force computational efficiency by precomputing the boundary volume values throughout the vascular structure and saving them to a volume map, which can be queried very efficiently during runtime. Moreover, we add term to the multiple-fluid model to handle the vascular viscosity, which achieves a more realistic effect. Experiments show that our method obtains more smooth and accurate particle states, and significantly improves initialization efficiency. Finally, we invited 12 clinicians to evaluate the algorithm and verify the clinical value of our algorithm.