A New Deformation Model of Biological Tissue for Surgery Simulation

A novel meshless deformation model of biological soft tissue, which is mainly based on the radial basis function point interpolation, is presented for interactive simulation applications such as virtual surgery simulators. Compared with conventional mesh models, the proposed model is particularly suitable for simulating large deformation, sucking and cutting tasks since there is no need to maintain grid information. Kelvin viscoelasticity, which represents relaxation, creep, and hysteresis of soft tissue, is integrated into the proposed model, making the simulation much more realistic than many existing meshless models. To verify the validity of the proposed model, a biomechanical test was performed on real-life biological tissue and the results show that the maximum relative error between the forces from the biomechanical test and those obtained from the model is less than 5.8%. The proposed model was also implemented on a neurosurgery simulator, which showed that the deformation of the brain tumor can be simulated in a high degree of accuracy with real-time performance. In particular, the error and distortion from the remeshing process inherited in conventional mesh models when deformation is large are avoided.