Lim YJ, Jones DB, De S. Improved virtual surgical cutting based on physical experiments. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2005; 111:301-7

PMID: 15718749

Abstract

Simulation of surgical cutting is one of the most challenging tasks in the development of a surgery simulator. Changes in topology during simulation make any precomputed data meaningless. Moreover, the process is nonlinear and given the complexity of soft tissue mechanics, the underlying physics is not well understood. Therefore, fully realistic procedures for the simulation of surgical cutting at real time rates on single processor machines is possibly out of reach. We developed a geometry-based algorithm that is capable of simulating progressive cutting without increasing the number of primitives and have coupled it to a meshfree physically based simulation scheme. In this paper we enhance a geometrically efficient cutting algorithm by including physical information from actual cutting experiments.