A robust and fast approach to simulating the behavior of guidewire in vascular interventional radiology.

Interventional radiology (IR) is widely used in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. The manipulation of the guidewire and catheter is an essential skill in IR procedure. Computer-based training simulators can provide solutions to overcome many drawbacks of the traditional apprenticeship training during the procedure. In this paper, a physically-based approach to simulating the behavior of the guidewire is presented. Our approach models the guidewire as thin flexible elastic rods with different resolutions which are dynamically adaptive to the curvature of the vessel. More material characteristics of this deformable material are integrated into our discrete model to realistically simulate the behavior of the wire. A force correction strategy is proposed to adjust the elastic force to avoid endless collision detections. Several experimental tests on our simulator are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.