4D Vessel Reconstruction for Benchtop Thrombectomy Analysis

Introduction: Mechanical thrombectomy can cause vessel deformation and procedure-related injury. Benchtop models are widely used for device testing, but time-resolved, full-field 3D vessel-motion measurements remain limited.

Methods: We developed a nine-camera, low-cost multi-view workflow for benchtop thrombectomy in silicone middle cerebral artery phantoms (2160p, 20 fps). Multi-view videos were calibrated, segmented, and reconstructed with 4D Gaussian Splatting. Reconstructed point clouds were converted to fixed-connectivity edge graphs for region-of-interest (ROI) displacement tracking and a relative surface-based stress proxy. Stress-proxy values were derived from edge stretch using a Neo-Hookean mapping and reported as comparative surface metrics. A synthetic Blender pipeline with known deformation provided geometric and temporal validation.

Results: In synthetic bulk translation, the stress proxy remained near zero for most edges (median ≈ 0 MPa; 90th percentile 0.028 MPa), with sparse outliers. In synthetic pulling (1–5 mm), reconstruction showed close geometric and temporal agreement with ground truth, with symmetric Chamfer distance of 1.714–1.815 mm and precision of 0.964–0.972 at τ = 1 mm. In preliminary benchtop comparative trials (one trial per condition), cervical aspiration catheter placement showed higher max-median ROI displacement and stress-proxy values than internal carotid artery terminus placement.

Conclusion: The proposed protocol provides standardized, time-resolved surface kinematics and comparative relative displacement and stress proxy measurements for thrombectomy benchtop studies. The framework supports condition-to-condition comparisons and methods validation, while remaining distinct from absolute wall-stress estimation. Implementation code and example data are available at github.com/ethanuser/4Dvessel.