In vitro patient-specific model of cerebral artery for evaluating procedures of endovascular intervention

An in vitro patient-specific vascular model, for simulating endovascular intervention is presented. Proposed vascular model reproduces the 3-dimensional vessel lumen structure using CT/MRI information with 13 /spl mu/m resolution, and it also reproduces the physical characteristics of arterial tissue (elastic modulus and friction coefficient). Furthermore, in this paper, we propose a novel method to evaluate the stress on vasculature which is applied by surgical operations. This method allows quantitatively evaluating 3-dimensional stress condition in real-time during surgical simulation. With these techniques, we finally constructed a comprehensive surgical simulation system, which reproduces whole human aorta structure (with more than 1 mm inside diameter), reproduce patient-specific pulsatile blood streaming, allowing interventionalists and developers to evaluate the stress on arterial wall applied by surgical operations with almost the same manner as the practical endovascular intervention. Consequently, the proposed model, stress analysis method and resultant system provides a valuable platform for evaluating the performance of surgical robots and instruments developed by developers and researchers, in addition to surgical procedures.