Design of 3-D Phantoms for Human Carotid Vasculature

Structural analysis of human carotid vasculature is important for in-depth clinical understanding and to delineate the underlying hemodynamics. Due to the natural difficulty in real-life patient study or ex-vivo analysis, digital phantom based experiments are gathering momentum. Design of accurate/approximate digital cerebro-vascular phantoms is of active interest, due to its acceptability in a wide range of simulation experiments. In this work, we discuss the theory and methods related to the design of 3-D mathematical models of human carotid arterial tree. These approximate phantoms are designed using sphere-based tubular structures, with a help of a custom-designed 2-D/3-D user interface. Multiple tubular structures with varying diameters are combined using piece-wise cubic Bèzier Curves to generate the complete arterial phantom, around the Circle of Willis. We propose robust mathematical models for the design of multilevel bifurcation phantoms with varying diameters. Qualitative analysis of the design strategy is presented with suitable 3-D rendering.