“A spring-net deformable model for surgery simulation with haptic feedback” by Chen, Barner and Steiner

Interactive modelling of complex, non-rigid, three-dimensional structures is a critical technique for surgery simulation. Such modelling based on volumetric data has been widely studied [Gibson 1997; Debunne et al. 2001; Wu et al. 2001]. The use of volumetric deformable models in real-time applications, however, are very limited, due to the low resolution data and high computational cost that are well known bottle necks of volumetric deformable models. In common virtual reality applications, organs and tissues are often represented by surface data in a form of triangular meshes. Compared to volumetric models, surface models require less memory storage and computations since they only contain object boundaries, which greatly reduces the object data. Therefore, real-time interaction is easier to achieve at very high resolutions, resulting in superior visual quality. The major challenge of simulating tissue deformations using surface mesh data is that the elastic theory are not applicable due to the fact that the interior data of organs are unavailable to perform the computations.

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