The Simulation of Benign Tumor Growth in Blood Vessels Circumstance

It is very important to predict displacements and deformations of the vessels near tumor before actinotheraphy or surgery. To simulate the influence to blood vessel induced by tumor growth, cellular automata is employed to simulate the tumor growth, and the tumor geometrical model is meshed to construct the finite element model with tetrahedron cells. At the same time, the vascular geometric model is constructed from a series of pictures and the blood vessels model is distilled from the model with the step of refining the vessels mesh following up to set up the FE thin shell model with triangle units. By collision detection method, contacted points are located and the forces are exerted on the point sets to simulate interaction caused by tumor growth. The experiment shows that the shape and location of tumor and blood vessels change, which conform to real case, and the model can predict the tumor growth status and the influence to tissues around the tumor.