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