CorFix: Virtual Reality Cardiac Surgical Planning System for Designing Patient Specific Vascular Grafts

Patients with single ventricle heart defect undergo Fontan surgery to reroute the blood flow from the lower body to the lung by connecting the inferior vena cava to the pulmonary artery using a vascular graft. Since each patient has an unique anatomical structure and blood flow dynamics, the graft design is a critical factor for maximizing the long-term survival rate of Fontan patients. Currently, designing and evaluating grafts involve computer aided design (CAD) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) skills. CAD incorporates numerous tools for design but lacks depth perception, surgical features, and design parameters for creating vascular grafts while visualizing and modifying patient anatomies. These limitations may lead to long lead times, inconsistent workflow, and surgically infeasible graft designs. In this paper, we introduce a novel virtual reality vascular graft modeling software - CorFix, that provides solutions to these challenges. CorFix includes several visualization features for performing diagnostics and surgical features with design guidelines for creating patient specific tube-shaped grafts in 3D. The designed vascular graft can be exported into a 3D model, which can be utilized for performing computational fluid dynamic analysis and 3D printing. The patient specific vascular graft designs in CorFix were compared to an engineering CAD software, SolidWorks (Dassault Systèmes, Vélizy-Villacoublay, France), by 8 participants. Through all participants had only received one time 10-minute tutorial on CorFix, CorFix had a higher success rate and 3.4 times faster performance in designing surgically feasible grafts than CAD. CorFix also scored higher in usability and lower in perceived workload than CAD. CorFix may be the tool that can enable medical doctors without 3D modeling background to design patient specific grafts.