Modelling of soft tissue deformation for laparoscopic surgery simulation

Virtual reality based surgical simulator systems offer a very elegant solut ion 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 ob stacle in developing simulators for soft-tissue surgery. The goal of the pr esent work is to develop a framework fur 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 formulatio n of the model, the development of scalable parallel solution algorithms, a nd special-purpose parallel hardware. The developed techniques will be used for the implementation of a gynecological laparoscopic VP-trainer system. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science BN. All rights reserved.