Fast and stable guidewire simulator for minimally invasive vascular surgery.

In recent years, minimally invasive vascular surgery is widely applied in treatment of cardiovascular diseases, and the manipulation of the guidewire is the essential skill for this surgery. Lots of time and money have to be taken to achieve the skill. In this paper, we present a multithreading guidewire simulator which can help the apprentice to gain the skill and modeling the guidewire is the core technique of the simulator. The guidewire is modeled by a fast and stable method based on the Cosserat theory of elastic rods. The method describes the behavior of the guidewire with the Lagrange equations of motion and it uses the penalty method to maintain constraints. We further propose a simplified solving procedure for the guidewire model. Finally, some experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this model.