Position based balloon angioplasty

Abstract

Balloon angioplasty is an endovascular procedure to widen narrowed or obstructed blood vessels, typically to treat arterial atherosclerosis. Simulating angioplasty procedure in the complex vascular structures is a challenge task since the balloon and vessels are both flexible bodies. In this paper, we proposed a position based balloon physical model to solve nonlinear physical deformation in the process of balloon inflation. Firstly, the balloon is discrete modeled by the closed triangle mesh, and the hyperelastic membrane material and continuum based formulation are combined to compute the mechanical properties in the process of balloon inflation. Then, an adaptive air mesh generation algorithm is proposed as a preprocessing procedure for accelerating the coming collision process between balloon and blood vessel according to the characteristic of collision area which is relative fixed. The experiment results show that this physical model is feasible, which could simulate the contact and deformation process between the inflation balloon and the diseased blood vessel wall with good robustness and in realtime.