Real-Time Deformation Simulation of Kidney Surgery Based on Virtual Reality

Virtual reality-based surgery simulation is becoming popular with the development of minimally invasive abdominal surgery, where deformable soft tissue is modelled and simulated. The mass-spring model (MSM) and finite element method (FEM) are common methods used in the simulation of soft tissue deformation. However, MSM has an issue concerning accuracy, while FEM has a problem with efficiency. To achieve higher accuracy and efficiency at the same time, we applied a co-rotational FEM in the simulation of a kidney with a tumour inside, achieving a real-time and accurate deformation simulation. In addition, we set a multi-model representation for mechanical simulation and visual rendering. The implicit Euler method and conjugate gradient method were adopted for setting and solving the linear system. For a realistic simulation of surgery, constraints outside the kidney and between the kidney and tumour were set with two series of mechanical properties for the two models. Experiments were conducted to validate the accuracy and real-time performance.