A physically-based virtual environment dedicated to surgical simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a system dedicated to the simulation of various physically-based and mainly deformable objects. Its main purpose is surgical simulation where many models are necessary to simulate the organs and the user's tools. In our system, we found convenient to decompose each simulated model in three units: The mechanical, the visual and the collision units. In practice, only the third unit is actually constrained, since we want to process collisions in a unified way. We choose to rely on a fast penalty-based method which uses approximation of the objects depth map by spheres. The simulation is sufficiently fast to control force feedback devices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.