Three-Dimensional Image-Based Biomedical Simulation for Estimation of Respiratory Function after Lobectomy

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present methods to estimate respiratory function after lobectomy. Lobectomy is a common surgical care for lung cancers. By lobectomy, whole lung lobe containing cancer is resected. Although this causes low recidivation rate, there is risk to lead to low respiratory function after lobectomy because of deformation of bronchus. The set of the methods presented in this paper consists of a method to generate virtual post-operative CT images, a method to simulate air-flow in bronchus by computational fluid dynamics simulation, and a method to deform bronchus region for virtual stenting. Applying these method to clinical CT images, effectiveness of the methods was shown.