Slicer 4.11
win 64
Hello, friends,
I used Slicer to create a blood vessel model, which contains arteries and veins.
I want to know how to add blood flow animation to the blood vessels.
Any suggestions will be helpful.
Thank you！
There are many ways to simulate blood flow. What is your end goal? Creating simulated vascular X-ray or CT fluoroscopy sequences?
Simulated vascular X-ray ，like DSA ，is ok.
Sure,I just want to get the animation effect of this kind of blood flow to tell the patients that the blood flows like this in the blood vessels of the brain.
A simple, closed-form solution for computing contrast agent concentration along a vessel in response to a contrast injection is given in Kump 2001. I just copy here the end result:
It is very easy to use this for DSA image simulation: C(z,t) gives you the concentration at z distance from the injection points at time t. The gray value of the image is k*C(z,t). The authors determined the parameters from measurements on leg DSA images and got these values:
You can use these as starting points and manually tune them a bit for blood flow in the brain.
You can simulate contrast filling by painting spheres along the centerline. Position and radius comes from the centerline computed by VMTK, z distance can be easily computed by accumulating distances between points, and the fill value k*C(z,t) can be computed by the formula above.
You can generate DSA images from the volumes using volume rendering, using the CT X-ray preset, setting the 3D view background to black.
For patient education, computing patient-specific blood flow may be too much effort. Why don’t you show the patient his real DSA image?