Cardiovascular and lung mesh generation based on centerlines

Abstract

We present a fully automatic procedure for the mesh generation of tubular geometries such as blood vessels or airways. The procedure is implemented in the open-source Gmsh software and relies on a centerline description of the input geometry. The presented method can generate different type of meshes: isotropic tetrahedral meshes, anisotropic tetrahedral meshes, and mixed hexahedral/tetrahedral meshes. Additionally, a multiple layered arterial wall can be generated with a variable thickness. All the generated meshes rely on a mesh size field and a mesh metric that is based on centerline descriptions, namely the distance to the centerlines and a local reference system based on the tangent and the normal directions to the centerlines. Different examples show that the proposed method is very efficient and robust and leads to high quality computational meshes.