Papers

Annually, hundreds of thousands of surgical interventions to correct nasal airway obstruction are performed throughout the world. Recent studies have noted that a significant number of patients have persistent symptoms of nasal obstruction postoperatively. In the present work, we introduce a new methodology that raises the success rate of nasal cavity surgery. In this procedure, the surgeon performs virtual surgery on a 3D nasal model of a patient prior to the real surgery. The main goal of the methodology is to guide the surgeon throughout the virtual operation using mathematical estimators based on CFD results. The virtual surgery intervention ends as soon as the estimators fall into a region of a Cartesian coordinate system with a high success probability. This region is defined according to a statistical analysis of estimators corresponding to sets of healthy and diseased cavities. As examples of this application, this study includes 2 surgical operations performed with this innovative methodology on patients with severe nasal obstruction. The patients underwent nasal surgery according to the final nasal geometry revealed by CFD-guided virtual surgery. Currently, both subjects show high degrees of satisfaction.