An improved realistic mass-spring model for surgery simulation

Abstract

An improved realistic mass-spring model, which is mainly based on the 3D finite strain nonlinear anisotropic elasticity theory, is presented for virtual reality based surgery simulation. Compared with the conversional mass-spring model, the proposed model is able to describe typical behaviors of living tissues such as incompressibility, nonlinearity and anisotropy. The nonlinear viscoelasticity is also incorporated into the soft tissue model by employing a numerical scheme. In terms of implementation, the model proposed can be seen as a mixture of finite-element and mass-spring models, which enables it to still maintain the advantage of mass-spring model, such as simple architectures, low memory usage and fast computation. An example to use this model to simulate human kidney is given to demonstrate its capability of describing the typical behaviors of soft tissue.