Patient-specific cardiovascular simulation has become a paradigm in cardiovascular research and is emerging as a powerful tool in basic, translational and clinical research. In this paper we discuss the recent development of a fully open-source SimVascular software package, which provides a complete pipeline from medical image data segmentation to patient-specific blood flow simulation and analysis. This package serves as a research tool for cardiovascular modeling and simulation, and has contributed to numerous advances in personalized medicine, surgical planning and medical device design. The SimVascular software has recently been refactored and expanded to enhance functionality, usability, efficiency and accuracy of image-based patient-specific modeling tools. Moreover, SimVascular previously required several licensed components that hindered new user adoption and code management and our recent developments have replaced these commercial components to create a fully open source pipeline. These developments foster advances in cardiovascular modeling research, increased collaboration, standardization of methods, and a growing developer community.
Provides a platform for patient-specific cardiovascular modeling and simulation.
SimVascular is an open source software suite for cardiovascular simulation, providing a complete pipeline from medical image data to 3D model construction, meshing, and blood flow simulation. SimVacular represents the state of the art in cardiovascular simulation, including advanced tools for physiologic boundary conditions, fluid structure interaction, and an accurate and efficient finite element Navier-Stokes solver. SimVascular integrates custom code with best-in-class open source packages to support clinical and basic science research.
DOCUMENTATION and CLINICAL EXAMPLES are available on the main project website at:
http://www.simvascular.org
Demo projects and examples for SimVascular can be downloaded at:
https://simtk.org/projects/sv_tests
Interested users should join the mailing list for the SimVascular project on simtk.org to be notified about upcoming releases and workshop announcements.
If you use SimVascular for your work, please cite the following publication:
Updegrove, A., Wilson, N., Merkow, J., Lan, H., Marsden, A. L. and Shadden, S. C., SimVascular - An open source pipeline for cardiovascular simulation, Annals of Biomedical Engineering (2016). DOI:10.1007/s10439-016-1762-8
The SimVascular project is funded by the NSF SSI program under Program Officers Rajiv Ramnath (ACI) and Sumanta Acharya (CBET).
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PRECOMPILED BINARIES are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems by clicking on the downloads menu.
Users interested in vascular models and associated imaging data and simulation results should visit the Vascular Model Repository at:
http://www.vascularmodel.com