Project description: Surgical simulation in virtual environments holds great promise for training future surgeons in common techniques, as well as all surgeons in new methodologies. Surgical simulations would allow surgeons to practice techniques numerous times without the cost and limitations of cadaver-based models or ethical problems of using real patients. Variations could be explored on identical virtual models so that they could be evaluated effectively. We have developed a prototype cornea virtual surgery system and functional anatomy visualization using FEM based deformation model and adaptive constraint techniques. One of the challenging problems in surgical simulation is to reduce the computational cost to achieve interactive refresh rates for both haptic and visualization devices, while maintaining reasonable behavioral realism. Since human organs are predominantly based on water, they preserve overall volume during deformation. Therefore, representing the volume-preserved behavior in dynamic system is essential to deliver realistic organ reaction in surgical simulation. We have developed a novel method to model human organs with volume preservation that keeps the material properties intact and requires virtually no additional computation to address both computational efficiency and visual realism. Our method incorporates an implicit volume constraint on a simple mass-spring system. Fast and robust volume preservation is also essential to achieve the realistic simulation of human muscle structure

 

Publications:

Min Hong, Sunhwa Jung, Min Choi, and Samuel Welch, Fast Volume Preservation for Realistic Muscle Deformation, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Sketches, August 2005 PDF

BiBTeX

Videos 

Movie

 

Sunwha Jung, Min Hong, Min-Hyung Choi, “Volume-Preserved Human Organs for Surgical Simulation,” Proceedings of the Central European Multimedia and Virtual Reality Conference (CEMVRC 05), June 2005 PDF BiBTeX

Videos 

Simulation1: A stomach model deforms responding to sphere's touch on its neck.

Simulation2: A stomach model deforms responding to sphere's touch on its top.

Simulation3: A stomach model deforms responding to sphere's touch on its top.

Simulation4: A liver model deforms responding to sphere's touch on its top.