A meshless rheological model for blood-vessel interaction in endovascular simulation.

A meshless rheological model is proposed for medical simulation of vascular procedures. Due to the complexity of rheologic models involved in endovascular simulations, delivering a high level of interactivity with realistic biomechanical feedback is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a particle-based rheologic modeling method for virtual catheterisation training applications. The effect of blood rheology has been simulated through a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) formulation of non-Newtonian flow. By modeling vessel wall structure as virtual particles, a pure Lagrange particle formulation for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is purposed for modeling the blood-vessel interaction. We further propose a flow-related thrombus (clot) formation-dissolution model based on our fluid-solid interaction framework. A physics processing API (PhysX) friendly implementation is proposed for incorporating the rheological properties of blood and vessel wall into our framework. Results have demonstrated the feasibility of employing our proposed meshfree framework in simulating blood-vessel interaction and clotting behaviors which are essential to endovascular simulations. Having benefited from the elegant formulation of Lagrangian particle interaction, interactive framerates of the simulation can be maintained under hardware-acceleration.