Interactive soft tissue modelling for virtual reality surgery simulation and planning

While most existing virtual reality-based surgical simulators in the literature use linear deformation models, soft-tissues exhibit geometric and material nonlinearities that should be taken into account for realistic modelling of the deformations. In this paper, an interactive soft tissue model (ISTM) which enables flexible, accurate and robust simulation of surgical interventions on virtual patients is proposed. In ISTM, simulating the tool-tissue interactions using nonlinear dynamic analysis is formulated within a total Lagrangian framework, and the energy function is modified by adding a term in order to achieve material incompressibility. The simulation results show that ISTM increases the stability and eliminates integration errors in the dynamic solution, decreases calculation costs by a factor of 5-7, and leads to very stable and sufficiently accurate results. From the simulation results it can be concluded that the proposed model can successfully create acceptable soft tissue models and generate realistically visual effects of surgical simulation.