An Interactive, Patient-Specific Virtual Surgical Planning System for Upper Airway Obstruction Treatments

Upper airway obstructions leading to difficulty breathing are significant problems that often require surgery to improve patient quality of life. However, these surgeries often have poor outcomes with little symptom improvement. This paper outlines the design of an interactive, patient-specific virtual surgical planning system that uses patient CT scans to generate three-dimensional representations of the airways and incorporates computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a part of the surgical planning process. Individualized virtual surgeries can be performed by editing these models, which are then analyzed using CFD to compare pre- and post-surgery flow characteristics to assess patient symptom improvement. The prototype system shows significant promise by being intuitive, interactive, with a potential fast flow solver that provides near real-time feedback to the clinician.