GPU-assisted real-time coupling of blood flow and vessel wall

The vessel wall and the blood flow interact and influence each other, and real‐time coupling between them is of great importance to the virtual surgery as well as the research and diagnosis of vascular disease. On the basis of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), we present a new approach to solve non‐Newtonian viscous force of blood and a parallel mixed particles‐based coupling method for blood flow and vessel wall. Meanwhile, we also design a proxy particle‐based vessel wall force visualization method. Our method is as follows. Firstly, we solve the non‐Newtonian viscous forces of blood through the SPH method to discretize the Casson equation. Secondly, in each time step, we combine blood particles and sampling proxy particles on the blood vessel wall to form mixed particles and calculate the interaction forces through the SPH method between every pair of the neighboring mixed particles inside the graphics processing unit. Thirdly, the forces of the proxy particles will be mapped to the color display of the proxy particle. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to implement real‐time sizeable coupling of blood flow and vessel wall while mainly ensuring physical authenticity and it can also provide real‐time and obvious information about vessel wall force distribution. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. We present a new approach to solve non‐Newtonian viscous force of blood and a parallel mixed particles‐based coupling method for blood flow and vessel wall. Meanwhile, we also design a proxy particle‐based vessel wall force visualization method.