Real-time elastic deformations of soft tissues for surgery simulation

In this paper, we describe a new method for surgery simulation including a volumetric model built from medical images and an elastic modeling of the d eformations. The physical model is based on elasticity theory which suitabl y links the shape of deformable bodies and the forces associated with the d eformation. A real-time computation of the deformation is possible thanks t o a preprocessing of elementary deformations derived from a finite element method. This method has been implemented in a system including a force feed back device and a collision detection algorithm. The simulator works in rea l-time with a high resolution liver model.