Modelling of soft tissue deformation for laparoscopic surgery simulation.

Virtual reality based surgical simulator systems offer a very elegant solution 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 obstacle in developing simulators for soft-tissue surgery. The goal of the present work is to develop a framework for 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 formulation of the model, the development of scalable parallel solution algorithms, and special-purpose parallel hardware. The developed techniques will be used for the implementation of a gynecological laparoscopic VR-trainer system.