Real-time And Haptic Suture Simulation In Virtual Surgery: Theory And Application

In this paper,we proposed a novel suture simulation method for visual and haptic realistic suture simulation in virtual surgery.This method employed the concept of control point which indicates the suture points in intersection with the soft tissue.Interaction forces during suture process are simulated on these control points,including friction force,surface tension force,and drag force.The forces can be easily extended when adding other kinds of forces.Compared to the traditional methods which uses control points to track the movement of the suture geometrically or which uses mass-spring model to simulate the interaction between the soft-tissue and the suture, our method has its superiority in both visual and haptic realism,and in both suture and tying simulation.In addition,it's highly scalable and efficient in computation.The main achievements and work of this paper is listed following:(1)A novel suture simulation method employing control points for force simulation is proposed.It solved the problem that the traditional control point suture simulation method cannot simulate forces physically for haptic rendering.In addition,its visual simulation realism is also superior to traditional methods.(2) According to the characteristics of the soft-tissue and the suture,our method simulated the surface tension,drag force and friction during the suture process.Its feedback force is much more reasonable than the mass-spring suture which simulates force by transferring force spring by spring without considering the characteristics of the forces itself.(3) Compared to traditional methods using control points which cannot render force or using mass-spring suture which cannot render force reasonably,our methods proved to be superior in visual,haptic realism and efficiency.(4) We improved the updating method in collision detection and self-collision detection for deformable models by the bottom-up way with a priority queue.(5) Our method has been used in the suture simulation system with a force feedback device "phantom".Abundant experiments are done to evaluate our method and finally proved its superiority.