Real-time simulation of self-collisions for virtual intestinal surgery

Abstract

The context of this research is the development of a pedagogical surgery simulator for colon cancer removal. More precisely, we would like to simulate the gesture which consists of moving the small intestine folds away from the cancerous tissues of the colon. This paper presents a method for animating the small intestine and the mesentery (the tissue that connects it to the main vessels) in real-time, thus enabling user-interaction through virtual surgical tools during the simulation. The main issue that we solve here is the real-time processing of multiple col-lisions and self-collisions that occur between the intestine and mesentery folds. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.