Comprehensive combined visualization of anatomy and hemodynamics

Abstract

In recent years, the assessment of patient-specific hemodynamic information of the cardiovascular system has become an important issue. It is believed that this information will improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Realistic patient geometries and flow velocities acquired from image data can nowadays be used as input for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the blood flow through the cardiovascular system. Results obtained from these simulations have to be comprehensively visualized so that the physician can understand them and draw diagnostic and/or therapeutic conclusions. The aim of the research reported in this paper is to provide methods for the combined comprehensive visualization of the anatomical information segmented from image data with the hemodynamic information acquired by CFD simulations based on these image data. Several methods are known for the visualization of the blood flow velocity, e.g. flow streamlines, particle traces or simple cut planes through the vessel with a color-coded overlay of the flow velocity. To make these flow visualizations more understandable for the physician, we have developed methods to generate combined visualizations of the simulated blood flow velocity and the patient’s anatomy segmented from the image data. First results of these methods show that the perception of CFD simulation results of blood flow is much better when it is combined with anatomical information of surrounding structures. Physicians reacted very enthusiastically during presentations of results of our new visualization methods. Results will be demonstrated at the conference.