Improving Understanding of Cardiovascular Structures: A Workflow to Visualize Patient-Specific Simulations in Virtual Reality

Computational simulations have contributed to improve the understanding of pathophysiology and treatment planning for cardiovascular diseases highlighting the possibilities of the Virtual Human Twin (VHT). Access to simulations’ results can, however, be a time- and resource-consuming process, which limits the access to modelling to experts only. Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely recognized for enriching the visualization process and lowering the barrier to access multi-source data. To date, there is not a comprehensive solution to integrate computational results into a VR platform for patient-specific simulations in the cardiovascular field. To overcome this challenge, we developed a semi-automated workflow designed to convert efficiently data of various sources into formats compatible with our in-house VR platform designed for patient-specific models (i.e. VheaRts). To demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed methodology, we showcase the visualization of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations of three patient-specific simulations. Through our VR-based visualization approach, the immersive experience of an anatomical model was enriched with detailed information about the dynamic flow patterns, pressure distributions and stress maps. The presented project will contribute to lower the barriers of access to computational results and in turn enhance the translation of the VHT.