Local Implicit Modeling of Blood Vessels for Interactive Simulation

In the context of computer-based simulation, contact management requires an accurate, smooth, but still efficient surface model for the blood vessels. A new implicit model is proposed, consisting of a tree of local implicit surfaces generated by skeletons (blobby models). The surface is reconstructed from data points by minimizing an energy, alternating with an original blob selection and subdivision scheme. The reconstructed models are very efficient for simulation and were shown to provide a sub-voxel approximation of the vessel surface on 5 patients.