Fluid dynamic visualisations of cuttings-bleeding for virtual reality heart beating surgery simulation

Visualisations and computations of a real time fluid dynamic rendering have always been a fascinating research topic in the field of computer graphics. However most existing virtual realities surgery simulators tend to avoid the fluid dynamic model involvement in their system. This is due to the fact that real time fluid dynamic visualisation is computationally expensive. The calculation may slow down the rendering time and reduce force feedback interactions during simulations. With the availability of high performance graphic hardware, the improvement of visual quality and computational accelerations become easier to achieve. In this paper, we propose fast and efficient fluid dynamic visualisations for a heart surgery simulation. The algorithm utilizes the GPUs capable streaming computations to generate physically-based computational fluid dynamic for bleeding in real time. Our approach is based on the Navier-Stokes Equations that is implemented on twodimensional data structure which stores height fields, blood quantity, and dissolving blood velocities. We use the cubic interpolated propagation as a fluid solver of blood movement. In this paper, the blood flowing on the surface of a beating heart when the surgical knife cut the heart muscle surface in a certain thickness. The blood will move from the sources and follow the height map of the heart surface. The comparison of the frame rates of surgery simulation with and without fluid inclusion is presented and proves that our approaches are effective enough for evolving fluid dynamic visualisation during surgical simulations. Abstract