Vascular flow rendering for interactive simulation of contrast and drugs injection

Abstract

In chemoembolization, chemotherapy drugs and thrombotic agents are directly injected into the liver tumor through a catheter navigated to the artery that supplies the tumor. In order to help surgeons to train their hand-eye coordination skills to reduce the risk of injecting the thrombotic agents incorrectly and deprive normal tissue of its blood supply, this paper proposes a method for rendering the flow particles in simulation of chemotherapy drugs injection. Firstly, a three dimensional (3-D) region growing technique is used to extract vessels from clinical CT images. These vessels are skeletonized using a 3-D thinning algorithm, and their geometries are reconstructed using cubic b-splines. Quadrilaterals which are aligned along the viewing direction are rendered to visualize the movement of particles through the flow modeled using Hagen-Poiseuille Flow. Our visualization method achieves a computational efficient and good visual approximation of the flow of particles inside the vessels under fluoroscopic imaging. ©2009 IEEE.