International audienceCongenital heart defect (CHD) corrective interventions in infants are extremely challenging due to commonly complex and heterogeneous disease pat-terns. At present, cardiac surgeons can only rely on non-invasive imaging prior to surgery. Critical decisions regarding the surgical procedure of choice and its exe-cution must be made during the actual surgery and are strongly dependent on ex-perience. We want to improve surgery planning by providing a simulation system that is able to accurately predict patient-specific results for different surgical pro-cedures preoperatively. Therefore we use a sophisticated simulation model based on thin shell elements. We present a novel joining approach that allows for im-plementing all necessary surgical low-level procedures, e.g. incising and suturing, independent from the simulation model. No modifications are necessary for al-ready approved thin shell implementations and our simulation system can instan-taneously benefit from further improved simulation models in the future. By re-ducing computationally expensive simulations to a minimum during a virtual surgery we can achieve a fluent workflow for surgeons. However, a specialized mesh resampling algorithm is required to fully utilize our simulation system
