Computer based system for simulating spine surgery

A computer based system described herein provides preoperative simulations to verify burring and morphological operations in spine surgery. An efficient bur-tissue intersection computation method is used to simulate tissue burring by diverse shapes of burs for various cutting procedures in spine surgery. A volume manipulation is then used to calculate burred changes on volume data, provide high-quality burred tissue surfaces and check if any structure separate from the spine. Morphological simulations such as repositions, deletions and fusions can be implemented on the separate structures for spine decompression and morphology correction. The coated surface or flutes on a bur are pre-divided into small elements in which a tissue removal force on each element can be fast summated to obtain the burring force by predetermined transformation matrices. Examples of typical spine surgery modalities illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and simulator.