Visualization of vascular injuries in extremity trauma.

Abstract

A tandem of particle-based computational methods is adapted to simulate injury and hemorrhage in the human body. In order to ensure anatomical fidelity, a three-dimensional model of a targeted portion of the human body is reconstructed from a dense sequence of CT scans of an anonymized patient. Skin, bone and muscular tissue are distinguished in the imaging data and assigned with their respective material properties. An injury geometry is then generated by simulating the mechanics of a ballistic projectile passing through the anatomical model with the material point method. From the injured vascular segments identified in the resulting geometry, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is employed to simulate bleeding, based on inflow boundary conditions obtained from a network model of the systemic arterial tree. Computational blood particles interact with the stationary particles representing impermeable bone and skin and permeable muscular tissue through the Brinkman equations for porous media. The SPH results are rendered in post-processing for improved visual fidelity. The overall simulation strategy is demonstrated on an injury scenario in the lower leg.