A Layered Model of a Virtual Human Intestine for Surgery Simulation

In this paper, we propose a new approach to simulate the small intestine in a context of laparoscopic surgery. The ultimate aim of this work is to simulate the training of a basic surgical gesture in real-time: moving aside the intestine to reach hidden areas of the abdomen. The main problem posed by this kind of simulation is animating the intestine. The problem comes from the nature of the intestine: a very long tube which is not isotropically elastic, and is contained in a volume that is small when compared to the intestine's length. It coils extensively and collides with itself in many places

Real-time Simulation of Self-collisions for Virtual Intestinal Surgery

International audienceThe context of this research is the development of a pedagogical surgery simulator for colon cancer removal. More precisely, we would like to simulate the gesture which consists of moving the small intestine folds away from the cancerous tissues of the colon. This paper presents a method for animating the small intestine and the mesentery (the tissue that connects it to the main vessels) in real-time, thus enabling user-interaction through virtual surgical tools during the simulation. The main issue that we solve here is the real-time processing of multiple collisions and self-collisions that occur between the intestine and mesentery folds

A physically-based virtual environment dedicated to surgical simulation

Abstract. In this paper, we present a system dedicated to the simulation of various physically-based and mainly deformable objects. Its main purpose is surgical simulation where many models are necessary to simulate the organs and the user’s tools. In our system, we found convenient to decompose each simulated model in three units: The mechanical, the visual and the collision units. In practice, only the third unit is actually constrained, since we want to process collisions in a unified way. We choose to rely on a fast penalty-based method which uses approximation of the objects depth map by spheres. The simulation is sufficiently fast to control force feedback devices. 1