Simulation of Blood Vessels for Surgery Simulators

Laparoscopic virtual reality based surgery simulators are becoming a ubiquitous tool in resident training and assessment. Blood vessels on abdominal organ surface are major visual cue of laparoscopic imagery, so it makes sense to develop algorithms of generation of blood vessels. Stochastic parameter Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) are formulated to generate blood vessel structures that can incorporate the physiological laws of blood vessel branching. With appropriate rewriting rules and choice of parameters, they can represent different organ blood vessels, and can exhibit the overall statistical character and the local stochastic character of the physiological system. Experiment results show that proposed method is feasible and effective.