Deformation and cutting in virtual surgery

This paper discusses key techniques of deformation and cutting in virtual surgery. It introduces a new geometry reconstruction algorithm, which can get a layered tetrahedron based volume model. Based on the real physical property of soft-tissue a simplified viscoelastic physical model is introduced, and the finite element method is used for the deformation computation. Different from the collision between rigid bodies, in a virtual surgery environment the collision happens usually between a rigid body and a soft body. This paper brings forward an FDH based bounding volume hierarchy algorithm to handle the collision detection successfully. In order to simulate the cutting operation, a global cutting algorithm is introduced. The 3D texture mapping is used to enhance the realistic effect.