title: Modelling of soft tissue deformation for laparoscopic surgery simulation.
abstract: Virtual reality based surgical simulator systems offer a very elegant solution to the development of endoscopic surgical trainers. While the graphical performance of commercial systems already makes PC-based simulators viable, the real-time simulation of soft tissue deformation is still the major obstacle in developing simulators for soft-tissue surgery. The goal of the present work is to develop a framework for the full-scale, real-time, finite element simulation of elastic tissue deformation in complex systems such as the human abdomen. The key for such a development is the proper formulation of the model, the development of scalable parallel solution algorithms, and special-purpose parallel hardware. The developed techniques will be used for the implementation of a gynecological laparoscopic VR-trainer system.
authors.affiliation: ETH Zentrum, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich. szekely@vision.ee.ethz.ch
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Székely
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Brechbühler
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hutter
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rhomberg
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ironmonger
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Schmid
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D013502:General Surgery / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D010535:Laparoscopy; D019060:Minimally Invasive Surgical Procedures; D014584:User-Computer Interface