Modeling and Simulation of Multi-frictional Interaction Between Guidewire and Vasculature

In the cardiovascular interventional operation, the surgeon steers the tip of a long-thin guidewire to reach the clinical targets while traveling through the inner of blood vessels, and performs a wide range of minimally invasive procedures. However, real-time simulating the physical deformation behaviours of guidewire caused by a large areas of frictional contact between guidewire and vasculature during insertion is a challenge task. From the microscopic view, this paper built a novel multi-frictional contact dynamics model based on flexible multi-body system to address the multi-frictional interaction between them. In the model, guidewire and vascular formed a flexible multi-body system and the process of contact and collision could be divided into three stages, including contact detection, contact handling and separation. In the first stage, a continuous collision detection algorithm based on an adaptive layer was proposed to obtain a set of “point-surface” contact pairs quickly. After confirming the contact areas, a multi-frictional contact dynamics algorithm based on nonlinear equivalent spring damping was put forward. In the normal direction, nonlinear spring damping model was used to compute the spring restoring force and nonlinear damping force. In the tangential direction, sliding friction, static friction and rolling friction were calculated during the collision between two bodies by coulomb friction model. Finally, all frictional forces in the contact areas were added to the physical models of guidewire for further simulating various non-linear deformation behaviors. The experimental results show that this algorithm is feasible and could simulate the multi-frictional interaction between guidewire and blood vessles very well with real-time performance.