Precise Parallel FEM-based Interactive Cutting Simulation of Deformable Bodies

Abstract

This paper presents a novel scalable parallel algorithm for cutting tetrahedral meshes for surgery simulation. Built upon the finite element method (FEM), it focusses on accurate incremental collision detection and efficient topology modification on GPU systems. The overall simulation comprises a small sequence of steps, and each is well parallelized using lock-free data structures. The only synchronization necessary are the few barriers between steps. Our experiments show that the entire simulation runs in real-time for large meshes (of sizes exceeding 1.5 million tetrahedra) and retains mesh quality during the simulation. We compare favorably with the state-of-the-art.