Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a potentially fatal disease in which blood clots travel from deep veins within the body, and migrate to lungs. When medicinal intervention fails (or is infeasible), a mechanical filter is surgically implanted in the inferior vena cava (IVC) in order to capture blood clots. Our technique generates patient-specific meshes of the IVC and the IVC filter to facilitate blood flow simulations, which provides surgical guidance to place the filter at the most desirable location. Our techniques involves segmentation of patient computer tomography (CT) images and virtual placement of a computer-aided design (CAD) IVC filter mesh. The image segmentation extracts a model of the IVC and its adjacent veins, and a surface mesh of the IVC is generated using the marching cubes algorithm. The IVC filter mesh is virtually placed in the IVC surface mesh by modeling superelastic properties of IVC filter, which is made from nitinol, and linear elastic properties of the IVC. A volume mesh is generated the warped surface mesh using the advancing front technique. Our technique is the first to generate patient-specific meshes and to use material-based modeling technique (as opposed to geometry-based modeling) to generate a volume mesh. Future work will focus on automation of the virtual implantation aspect of the computational pipeline.

Shankar P. Sastry, Jibum Kim, Suzanne M. Shontz, Brent A. Craven, Frank C. Lynch, Keefe B. Manning, and Thap Panitanarak, Patient-specific model generation and simulation for pre-operative surgical guidance for pulmonary embolism treatment, Invited submission to Image-Based Modeling and Mesh Generation, Springer, Under review, November 2011.