Simulating vascular systems in arbitrary anatomies

Abstract

Better physiological understanding of principles regulating vascular formation and growth is mandatory to their efficient modeling for the purpose of physiologically oriented medical applications like training simulation or pre-operative planning. We have already reported on the implementation of a visually oriented modeling framework allowing to study various physiological aspects of the vascular systems on a macroscopic scale. In this work we describe our progress in this field including (i) extension of the presented model to three dimensions, (ii) addition of established mathematical approaches to modeling angiogenesis and (iii) embedding the structures in arbitrary anatomical elements represented by finite element meshes.