Modeling the dynamics of a human liver for a minimally invasive surgery simulator

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery techniques will probably be widely used in the near future for a large number of surgical procedures. However, these procedures are difficult to learn and high-fidelity computer simulation will be of great help to acquire these skills. In this paper, we describe how we have modeled a human liver for the purpose of developing an interactive dynamic simulator. This model makes use of a combination of 2D and 3D spring-dampers meshes to represent the heterogeneous mechanical characteristics of the liver. The related models and algorithms have been designed in order to obtain real-time responses to the operator actions, done using a virtual tool.