Simulation ready anatomy model generation pipeline for virtual surgery

Abstract

For surgery simulation application, a high-quality anatomical model is very important not only for rendering but also for physics simulation. CT and MRI reconstructed model has no surface parameterization attribute so texture-based materials cannot be applied for rendering. Anatomical models on the digital market are efficient options but most can only be used for visualization because of the nonmanifold geometric degeneracies. We proposed a simulation ready model generation pipeline that can convert a nonmanifold polygonal surface mesh into a degeneracy free surface mesh (simulation ready state) while preserving the original model's surface parameterization attribute. Our pipeline includes two stages. The first stage is a voxelization and remesh based simulation ready model generation pipeline, which can keep the shape of the original three-dimensional surface model meanwhile eliminate the nonmanifold geometry. The second stage is the main contribution of this article. A cutting-based surface mesh parameterization transfer algorithm is proposed which can transfer the original surface parameterization (UV mapping especially the UV seam)to the simulation ready model. A detailed comparison with existing pipelines is made to show that our pipeline can achieve surface parameterization preservation feature and is more suitable for improving the efficiency of virtual surgery production.