High-quality vascular modeling and modification with implicit extrusion surfaces for blood flow computations

Abstract

Background and objective: High-quality vascular modeling is crucial for blood flow simulations, i.e., computational fluid dynamics (CFD). As without an accurate geometric representation of the smooth vascular surface, it is impossible to make meaningful blood flow simulations. The purpose of this work is to develop high-quality vascular modeling and modification method for blood flow computations.

Methods: We develop a new technique for the accurate geometric modeling and modification of vasculatures using implicit extrusion surfaces (IES). In the proposed method, the skeleton of the vascular structure is subdivided into short curve segments, each of which is then represented implicitly locally as the intersection of two mutually orthogonal implicit surfaces defined by distance functions. A set of contour points is extracted and fitted with an implicit curve for accurately specifying the vessel cross-section profile, which is then extruded locally along the skeleton to fill the gaps between two vascular tube cross sections. We also present a new implicit geometric editing technique to modify the constructed vascular model with pathology for virtual stenting.

Results: Experimental results and validations show that accurate vascular models with highly smooth surfaces can be generated by the proposed method. In addition, we conduct some blood flow simulations to indicate the effectiveness of proposed method for hemodynamic simulations.

Conclusions: The proposed technique can achieve precise geometric models of vasculatures with any required degree of smoothness for reliable blood flow simulations.

Keywords: Blood flow simulation; Extrusion surfaces; Geometric modeling; Implicit functions; Vascular visualization.