Guidewire path determination for intravascular applications.

Vascular diseases are among the major causes of death in developed countries and the treatment of those pathologies may require endovascular interventions, in which the physician utilizes guidewires and catheters through the vascular system to reach the injured vessel region. Several computational studies related to endovascular procedures are in constant development. Thus, predicting the guidewire path may be of great value for both physicians and researchers. However, attaining good accuracy and precision is still an important issue. We propose a method to simulate and predict the guidewire and catheter path inside a blood vessel based on equilibrium of a new set of forces, which leads, iteratively, to the minimum energy configuration. This technique was validated with phantoms using a ∅0.33 mm stainless steel guidewire and compared to other relevant methods in the literature. This method presented RMS error 0.30 mm and 0.97 mm, which represents less than 2% and 20% of the lumen diameter of the phantom, in 2D and 3D cases, respectively. The proposed technique presented better results than other methods from the literature, which were included in this work for comparison. Moreover, the algorithm presented low variation (σ=0:03 mm) due to the variation of the input parameters. Therefore, even for a wide range of different parameters configuration, similar results are presented for the proposed approach, which is an important feature and makes this technique easier to work with. Since this method is based on basic physics, it is simple, intuitive, easy to learn and easy to adapt.