High Fidelity Computational Models for Aggregated Tissue Interaction in Surgical Simulations

Surgical simulations aiming to support surgeon practices and medical education have attracted enormous research effort over the last two decades. However, the physical reality, especially on simulating aggregated tissue interaction, is still unsatisfactory. In this proposed work, an open source surgery simulation framework, SoFMIS, will be utilized and enhanced with tissue interaction models to account for the interaction between aggregated tissues. This interaction model will consider contact, friction, and adhesion between tissues, which may depend on hydration, temperature and other tissue physiology states. The model will be formulated as linear complimentary problem and solved with a novel iterative predictor-corrector procedure. The developed model will be verified and plugged into SoFMIS through its collision detection and contact response module, and then can be connected with haptic devices for virtual reality surgical simulations. At the end of Phase I, the overall software framework will be demonstrated on a prototype surgical simulation virtual reality (VR) system. In Phase II, the interaction model will be further developed with advanced material models and demonstrated on improved VR system with specific haptic devices. The simulation will be validated with experimental measured data as well as user feedback from practicing selected surgical simulations.