Interactive Synthesis of 3D Geometries of Blood Vessels

Abstract

In surgical training simulators, where various organ surfaces make up the majority of the scene, the visual appearance is highly dependent on the quality of the surface textures. Blood vessels are an important detail in this; they need to be incorporated into an organ’s texture. Moreover, the actual blood vessel geometries also have to be part of the simulated surgical procedure itself, e.g. during cutting. Since the manual creation of vessel geometry or branching details on textures is highly tedious, an automatic synthesis technique capable of generating a wide range of blood vessel patterns is needed. We propose a new synthesis approach based on the space colonization algorithm. As extension, physiological constraints on the proliferation of branches are enforced to create realistic vascular structures. Our framework is capable of generating three-dimensional blood vessel networks in a matter of milliseconds, thus allowing a 3D modeller to tweak parameters in real-time to obtain a desired appearance.