A FEM Model for Interactive Simulation of Guide Wire Navigation in Moving Vascular Structures

In this paper a FEM model is proposed to simulate the guide wire navigation procedure in moving vascular structures. The virtual instruments are discretized with the multi-body representation, while the moving vascular structures are represented by a sequence of binary volumes segmented from the patient´s data sets. The corresponding potential fields can be obtained by applying distance transform to the dynamic volumes. The collision and interaction between instruments and the moving vascular structures can be efficiently simulated with the potential fields and the FEM model, which drastically reduce the complexity of computation and makes interactive simulation possible. Comparing with mesh-based methods, the approach is both efficient and robust. Experimental results show the approach significantly improves the performance of simulation, especially in the circumstance of guide wire navigation in moving vessels.