Fast computation of soft tissue deformations for real-time medical training simulators: the HEML method and open-source software

We are interested in medical training simulators which show a lot of advantages to improve the quality of surgeons' gestures. For such kind of Virtual Reality simulators, the deformation of soft tissues need to be simulated realistically; at the same time, from the computational point of view, it is necessary to update information as rapidly as possible. Some existing methods are still time consuming and limited in number of elements by algorithm complexity. We present in this paper the HEML (Hyper-Elastic Mass Links) method, which is generic, fast and realistic. We demonstrate on a mesh issued from real patient (MRI scan image data) that real-time computation for visual display can be handled by the method. The experiment is performed on an Open-source implementation of the HEML method, which is publicly available.