ENDOCAS - Center for Computer Assisted Surgery

Organs and tissue deform both under external forces, for instance the ones arising from the contact with surgical tools, and under body forces, e.g.. their own weight. The techniques to compute such deformation belong to the field from mechanical engineering and, in the last decade, have been extensively adopted in the field of computer graphics, producing a variety of new approaches that mediate between the computational expensiveness of the original models and the need for interactive response.

Deformable modeling based on mesh free method

Though there are well know techniques for deformable object modelling, the specific context of this project will require to produce ad hoc solutions for environment like the inside of a human body, where many deformable objects must be modelled in close contact situation, with consequent augmented difficulty in handling collision detection and response.

Apart from the technique used, it is always true that the time required for the computation of the deformation depends on the fineness of the object description. For this reason multiresolution techniques are used.
The objective of this part of the research is the realization of a simulator based on dynamic virtual environments which allows the user to acquire and improve the abilities necessary to move the surgical tools coherently during the intervention. The simulator should allow the user to interact with dynamic virtual environments by using real surgical tools (or replica), which are sensorized so that it is possible to reproduce their positions in the virtual environment and to monitor all parameters necessary to evaluate the performance. Interesting research topics in this area are related to the force feedback interaction.

Interfaces: physical mock-ups, haptic interface, head mounted display, virtual/mixed reality

Material:

Cutting deformable objects: 1 2 3 4 5

Bone drilling 1 2 3

Published on: 2005-04-28 (2986 reads)

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