A real-time deformation modeling scheme of soft tissue for virtual surgical

Surgical simulation is a promising technology for training medical students and planning procedures. Although an amount of research efforts have been dedicated to simulating the deformation of soft tissues, modeling of soft tissue deformation is still a challenging problem. From the viewpoint of real-time simulation, this paper presents a novel deformation modeling scheme based on mass-spring model for virtual soft tissue. This method limits the computation within a region of influence, of which location is changing with the location of the virtual touch probe on the surface of soft tissue. This scheme improves the computational efficiency and saves a great lot of memory. In addition, the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method is chosen as the numerical integrator of the model. The modeling approach has been integrated into a virtual palpating surgery training system and the users could control the virtual tools and manipulate the virtual organs with the haptic devices. Results show the system has achieve the level of real-time interaction.