Cardiovascular disease is the major cause of death in the Western world, of which vascular disease is a main contributing factor. Current endovascular repair involves guiding specially shaped catheters to a specific target in the aorta and auxiliary arterial vessels combined with different treatment options, including stenting, embolization and ablation. The skills required for such interventions are very challenging to learn and are typically acquired over several years. Medical simulation is rapidly taking the stage since it may reduce this burden by allowing trainees to practice such procedures without risk to patients.
The purpose of the project is to develop a model of an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm to simulate Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (EVAR) techniques. Endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm repair aims to deploy a stent graft with image guidance, securing device fixation to the vascular wall covering the diseased aneurysmal sections, thus eliminating AAA sac pressurization.
For the development of the model, CT scans of a phantom of an abdominal aorta with an aneurysm are acquired, and from such acquisitions is reconstructed a 3D model and, subsequently, a mesh is set up on it. The surgical simulation is done using SOFA Framework (https://www.sofa-framework.org/), an open-source software primarily targeted at real-time simulation with an emphasis on medical simulation. The simulation will focus on the interaction between a catheter and the endothelial tissue of the blood vessel to make its behaviour as faithful as possible to that of the phantom (and consequently to the real). To simulate deformations, a finite element analysis (FEM) will be implemented within SOFA.