Blood flow and Contrast Agent Propagation

Introduction (15 May - 18 Sep, 2009):

St.Mary's Hosptial, London, UK

This project is my postgraduate individual graduation project, which is part of the research and development of a vascular interventional radiology simulator, supervised under Dr. Fernando Bello and Dr. Vincent Luboz. This project of the CRAIVE consortium is funded by EPSRC. The aim of this project is to develop and validate a computer generated virtual environment (VE) with variable virtual anatomy, in which the appearance, 'feel' and human factors of invasive radiological procedures (interventiaonal radiology, IR) in patients can be reproduced and assessed. The final simulator will encompass needle puncture as well as guidewire and catheter intertion and manipulation [1]. See a Catheterization example.

My job is to simulate the contrast agent propagation injected by a virtual catheter through complex virtual vasculature, as well as be affected and interacted with different styles of blood flow. The created module can be integrated into the existing interventional radiology simulator to improve its diagnosis and navigation steps, as well as enhances the vitual medical environment. The main method is smoothed-particle hydrodynamics, and the development tools covers VTK, FLTK and the language C++, under the environment Visual Studio 2005.

The final effect I'm trying to achieve can be seen in the Video.1.

Video 1. Injection contrast agent by catheter through Carotid


----------------------------------------------
On 19 May 2009, I attend the
Cross faculty workshop in robotics supported by The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London.
Cochair: Professor Lord Darzi and Professor Guang-Zhong Yang















----------------------------------------------
Last weeks' achievement (27 May, 2009 - 3 Jun, 2009)

>> Create the initial effect of contrast agent propagation by particle-based rendering.
>> Add user interface of Fluid.
>> Read three articles:

[1]. Vincent Luboz, James Lai, Rafal Blazewski, Derek Gould, Fernando Bello. A Virtual Environment for Core Skills Training in Vascular Interventional Radiology. ISBMS 2008, LNCS 5104, pp. 215–220, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008. Full text(Pdf)

[2]. Vincent Luboz, Rafal Blazewski, Derek Gould , Fernando Bello. Real-time guidewire simulation in complex vascular models. Vis Comput. DOI 10.1007/s00371-009-0312-x.© Springer-Verlag 2009. Full text(Pdf)

[3]. Ken-ichi Tsubota, Shigeo Wada, Takami Yamaguchi. Particle method for computer simulation of red blood cell motion in blood flow. computer methods and programs in biomedicine 8 3 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 139–146. Full text(Pdf)

------------------------------------------------
This weeks' arrangements(3 Jun, 2009 - 10 Jun, 2009)

Basic:
>> Simulation the process of particles injected from the moving tips of the virtual catheter.
>> User-interface of poped window for identifying the number of particles needed.
>> Effect of a more reasonable linking of the particles.

Further:
>> Add differnt size of particles, achieve the effect of the contrast agent will propagated through different cross size of the vessels, as well as fluid to the different number of vessels.

Reading:
>> Bart Adams, Mark Pauly, Richard Keiser, Leonidas J. Guibas. Adapatively Sampled Particle Fluid. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007. Full text(Pdf)