Real-time synthesis of bleeding for virtual hysteroscopy

Abstract

Simulating bleeding in a virtual reality surgical simulator is an important task that still has not found a visually appealing solution. Bleeding in a simulator not only tests a surgeon to deal with critical issues, but also affects the environment by obscuring the view in which the surgeon has to operate. For any virtual reality surgical simulator, bleeding has to be treated, while at the same time the bleeding has to be responsive to any feedback that the surgeon may be conducing to the virtual reality environment. And all this has to be performed in real-time, i.e. at frame-rate. In this paper we present a methodology for solving this particular problem and show preliminary results of real-time visualization of bleeding in a dynamic virtual reality environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.