Real‐time FEM for the Virtual Surgery of Soft Tissues

Abstract

The virtual surgery of soft tissues, such as the virtual laparoscopy, requires realistic 3D models of all the inner organs belonging to the virtual scenario, which in connection with fast numerical algorithms have to assure the real-time performance of the simulation. The simulation has to take into account the interaction of the surgical instruments with the organs, the contact behavior between the organs including self contact as well as cutting, stitching, bleeding, coagulation etc. Recently, different approaches have been published to achieve a real time performance with sufficient accuracy. In the paper a finite element approach is presented, which includes the geometrical and physical nonlinear dynamic behavior of the organs during the surgery as well as the required contact conditions between the organs and the organs with surgical instruments. Some simplifications of the standard procedure (contact search, updating rate, etc.) to increase the computational speed as well as the beneficial behavior of an implicit time integration scheme resulting in larger time steps are discussed. In the paper some examples are presented to demonstrate the performance and the accuracy of the approach.