Vascular deformation for vascular interventional surgery simulation

Background: Obtaining the expertise to perform minimally vascular interventional surgery (VIS) requires thorough training. Previous VIS simulators have generally assumed that blood vessels are rigid. However, vascular deformation occurs unavoidably in VIS. In this study, the arterial walls were analysed as soft tissue. Methods: A mass-spring model (MSM) was applied for vascular deformation simulation. To improve simulation precision, the spring coefficient was derived from a reference model, simulated with a linear finite element method (FEM), which established a link between the spring coefficient and the properties of the vascular materials. In order to evaluate the simulation results, we applied identical external forces to FEM and MSM and calculated their deformations. Additionally, based on the proposed MSM, we designed a VIS simulator to achieve renal artery intervention. Quantitative validation was performed by comparing the simulated catheter position with a reference position, as assessed by 3D rotational angiography imaging. Results: From the simulation results, we could clearly see that MSM deformation was real-time and very close to the linear FEM reference, and MSM was successfully adopted in our renal artery intervention simulator. Conclusion: MSM with a spring coefficient derived from linear FEM was able to produce a realistic deformation simulation of arterial walls. This method could also be extended to model other organ deformations.