A Special Purpose Co-Processor Prototype for Virtual Surgery Simulators

Virtual surgery simulators have recently emerged as an important tool in training surgeons. A typical simulator consists of the set of artificial surgical tools, the graphical display, and the processing unit to compute the deformations of the organ under operation. This paper presents a novel 3D fixed-point FPGA-based prototype processor that computes, in a virtual simulator, the deformations of the organ. The proposed processor not only overcomes the fixed organ connectivity faced in previous designs, but also allows real-time computations without any restriction on the number and direction of neighbors for each point in the modeled organ. Furthermore, it provides a scalable system with modular underlying SIMD sub processors. The first generation proof-of-concept system is implemented on 2v8000ff1152-5 Virtex2 device. The second generation system, when implemented on ASIC, is expected to have about x600 speedup over the software solution.