A physically-based model for guidewire simulation on patient-specific data

Minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) has radically transformed traditional surgical techniques. However, with the currently available tools, the interventionalist has to rely solely on his/her past experiences to place guidewire and stents at the desired location. While various valuable decision-making metrics have been developed to aid the interventionalist, recognition of the behavior of guidewires, catheters, stents, etc., inside patient-specific vessel data would enhance the reliability of his/her decisions. Such interventions are hard to simulate using analytical methods but may be modeled accurately by numerical techniques such as finite element methods (FEM). In the present work, the goal is not to provide an example of a model surgical procedure on standard anatomy, but to simulate the tool-vessel interaction on patient-specific vascular models extracted in near real-time. We present successful implementation of our FEM simulation on clinical data sets.