Creating New Cut-able Softbody Tech
Surgical simulations can’t be made with standard game engines; New tech is needed that can simulate surgical interactions like cutting. This is a paper I wrote describing a software/framework I made for simulating tissue that can be cut. It is written in C++ and uses CUDA for the real-time soft-body (mechanical) simulation. Real-time 3D rendering is achieved with OpenGL or DirectX (via 2 versions; the rendering method was not the focus).
TSF: A Versatile New Tissue Simulation Framework
Authors: Greg Ruthenbeck, Fabian Lim, Karen Reynolds
Abstract:
Medical simulation has the potential to revolutionize the training of medical practitioners. Advantages include reduced risk to patients, increased access to rare scenarios and virtually unlimited repeatability. Effective simulation based training relies on the realism of key interactions. These key interactions require deformable tissues that not only look sufficiently detailed and realistic, but also have compelling mechanical behavior and the ability to be modified interactively. Creating realistic simulated tissues that meet these requirements, and that also support the high update rates required for effective haptic rendering, is critical to the development of effective medical simulations. Existing approaches address subsets of these requirements. This paper describes a versatile new approach to interactive tissue simulation we refer to as the Tissue Simulation Framework (TSF). The TSF achieves high levels of visual and mechanical fidelity whilst supporting unrestricted volumetric tissue removal and stable haptic interaction by leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of programmable graphics processing units (GPUs).
Full article (PDF) on ResearchGate.