SimVascular: Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation Application
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One of the main goals of the Cardiovascular Biomechanics Research Lab (CVBRL) at Stanford is to use numerical flow simulations to study hemodynamics. These simulation results could provide insight into vascular disease processes. They could also aid vascular surgeons in treatment planning and help engineers design better medical devices. A number of software packages are used during these flow simulations.
The primary software system is SimVascular, which is descended from the ASPIRE2 internal lab software. SimVascular is customized for building geometric models from medical imaging data, generating the data files needed to run flow simulations, and processing and visualizing the results from these simulations. It can also be used to interact with and visualize the medical imaging data directly.
Although SimVascular was designed for internal lab use, Charles Taylor, the director of the CVBRL, decided to open source much of his lab’s software through Simbios, the NIH Center for Biomedical Computation at Stanford. The released SimVascular software is a snapshot of the lab’s software with proprietary elements either removed or made available to the general public through a licensing process.
SimVascular includes a Stanford-customized version of the PHASTA flow simulation software developed by Ken Jansen and colleagues at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute.
SimVascular currently requires the use of three commercial software packages. Parasolid is a high-performance 3D geometric modeling software component from UGS. MeshSim, from Simmetrix Inc., is component software for automatically generating high-quality meshes directly geometric models. LesLib, from AcuSim Inc., is an iterative solver. Rather than expend substantial time trying to duplicate the functionality provided by these commercial components, the CVBRL simply licensed the commercial software and integrated it into the SimVascular system. The initial public releases of SimVascular requires licensing of these components as well. More information can be found on the Simtk.org website under the SimVascular project page.
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