Patient-specific neurovascular simulator for evaluating the performance of medical robots and instrumens

An in vitro patient-specific vascular model, for simulating endovascular intervention is presented. Proposed vascular model reproduces the 3-dimensional vessel lumen structure using CT/MRI information with 13 mum resolution, and it also reproduce the physical characteristics of arterial tissue (elastic modulus and friction coefficient). Furthermore, in this paper, we propose a novel method to evaluate the stress on vasculature which is applied by surgical operations. This method allows quantitatively evaluating 3-dimensional stress conditions in real-time during surgical simulation. Finally, we constructed a comprehensive surgical simulation system, which reproduces whole human aorta structure (with more than Imm inside diameter), reproduce patient-specific pulsatile blood streaming, allowed to evaluate the stress applied to the aorta structure by surgical operations with almost same manner and environment as the practical endovascular intervention. Consequently proposed model, evaluation method and resultant system provides a very valuable platform for evaluating the performance of surgical robots and instruments developed by developers and researchers, and surgical procedures