Topology supported finite element method analysis of catheter/guidewire navigation in reconstructed coronary arteries

Reports on a real-time finite element method (FEM) for the analysis of catheter and guidewire navigation in coronary arteries. A three-dimensional model of the coronary arterial tree is reconstructed from a professional model using Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) probing and the coronary anatomy is represented as a topologic hierarchy structure. Each segment of the vessel is associated only with its relative segments; i.e. parents and children. By doing so, the boundary checking of the catheter/guidewire in/outside the vessel is performed upon an optimized group of a small number segments and, therefore, has dramatically reduced the time for contact detection and subsequently the computation for catheter navigation. This approach has been applied to the authors' interventional cardiology simulator development.