Optimal shape determination of guidewire for liver catheterization based on 3D vessel structure

Catheterization is the treatment insert tube which name is catheter from thigh's or wrist's artery and discharge fluid, give medicine to affected area directly etc. Recently this treatment is commonly performed because make only a small hole to the patient body thus patient bears little risks. At the catheterization, expert surgeon's experience and knowledge are needed for making optimal shape of guidewire. There is not enough established objective criterion to decide the shape of guidewire. Therefore this research's goal is to develop semi-automated system for the determination of the optimal shape of guidewire's tip at the vessel bifurcation. In the previous research, we determined the optimal shape of guidewire two-dimensionally to reduce computation time. However, two-dimensionally determination has problem which is not shown real movement of the treatment. In this research, we extend the previous method to determine the optimal shape three-dimensionally and simulate more realistic movement of guidewire. In order to reduce the computation time, we consider the real operation of catheterization and the position of the tip of the catheter in the vessel. We decided position and direction of tip of catheter manually in this research. Moreover, we perform the phantom experiment to validate the proposed method whether the guidewire could reach the target branch vessel using the estimated shape of the guidewire. At the phantom experiment and 3D determination by proposed method, we got same result and it conforms to the real. One of the shapes of the guidewire's tip which is "A" arrive to target branch thus the other shape which is "B" doesn't arrive to target branch.