A GPU accelerated spring mass system for surgical simulation.

There is a growing demand for surgical simulators to do fast and precise calculations of tissue deformation to simulate increasingly complex morphology in real-time. Unfortunately, even fast spring-mass based systems have slow convergence rates for large models. This paper presents a method to accelerate computation of a spring-mass system in order to simulate a complex organ such as the heart. This acceleration is achieved by taking advantage of modern graphics processing units (GPU).