The simulation of medical guidewires has been a challenging problem in the field of computational medicine. The guidewire is a thin and flexible rod that is used in medical procedures to navigate through the human body. The simulation of guidewire is important for training medical students and for planning medical procedures. In this thesis, we present a improved method for simulating guidewire using the Cosserat rod theory in the Unity game engine. The Cosserat rod theory is a mathematical model that describes the behavior of thin and flexible rods. We use the Cosserat rod theory to model the guidewire as a series of connected particles. We then simulate the guidewire using the position and orientation-based dynamics. Instead of using the standard Euler integration, we implement the second-order symplectic verlet scheme. Additionally, we enabled large rod-element lengths by implementing collisions with these rod elements. These changes had a significnat effect on the stability and computation efficiency, compared to previous approaches. We validate our method by comparing the simulation results with the analytical solution of the Cosserat rod theory. For more complicated cases, we created a ground-truth and com pared the solution for different parameters to this reference. Our method is able to simulate the guidewire with high accuracy and efficiency. We believe that our method can be used in medical training and planning applications.

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See also the presentation pdf or pptx

The repository with all code and some assets is hosted on github