Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
vascular construction and endo-device modelling techniques, and introduce the
mathematical background of the 1D model. Secondly, we present some preliminary
results for haemodynamics modelling in a normal and an occluded arterial tree.
Finally we discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach.
2 Method
2.1 Arterial Tree Construction
The vascular models were built directly from medical scanning images, e.g.,
computed tomography angiography (CTA) and magnetic resonance angiography
(MRA) data. Since blood vessels in these images are enhanced, their centerlines
may be extracted by using 3D skeletonisation algorithms [
9
]. However, accurate
extraction of vessel skeleton is not trivial for 3D images, and the critical vascular
topology information has to be manually reconstructed. Hence, we employ an
approach which is similar to that of [
6
]. The process is outlined as follows:
1. Some key points along the blood vessel centerline are selected as nodes, the
radius at each node is defined as a field (Fig.
2
a);
2. These nodes are connected by 1D cubic Hermite elements to represent the
skeleton of blood vessels (Fig.
2
b); and
3. By incorporating radius field continuous cylinders are constructed along the
skeleton to visualise blood vessels (Fig.
2
c).
Fig. 2 (a) Nodes are selected along the vascular centerlines; (b) these nodes are connected by 1D
cubic Hermite elements; (c) by incorporating radius field continuous cylinders are constructed
along the skeleton to visualise blood vessels
