Implicit Representations of the Human Intestines for Surgery Simulations

In this paper, we propose a modeling of the intestines by implicit surfaces for abdominal surgery simulation. The difficulty of such a simulation comes from the animation of the intestines. As a matter of fact, the intestines are a very long tube that is not isotropically elastic, and that bends over itself at various spots, creating multiple self-contacts. We use a multiple component model for the intestines: The first component is a mechanical model of their axis; the second component is a specific sphere-based model to manage collisions and selfcollisions; and the third component is a skinning model to define their volume. This paper focuses on the better representation for skinning the intestines. We compare two implicit models: Surfaces defined by point-skeletons and convolution surfaces. A direct application of this simulation is the training of a typical surgical gesture to move apart the intestines in order to reach certain areas of the abdomen.