Interactive physically-based simulation of catheter and guidewire

For over 20 years, interventional methods have improved the outcomes of patients with cardiovascular disease or stroke. However, these procedures require an intricate combination of visual and tactile feedback and extensive training periods. An essential part of this training relates to catheter or guidewire manipulation. In this paper, we propose a composite model to realistically simulate a catheter, a guidewire or a combination of both. Where a physics-based simulation of both devices would be computationally prohibitive and would require to deal with a large number of contacts, we propose to address this problem by replacing both objects by a composite model. This model has a dual visual representation and can dynamically change its material properties to locally describe a combination of both devices. Results show that the composite model exhibits the same characteristics of a catheter/guidewire combination while maintaining real-time interactions.