A hybrid condensed finite element model with GPU acceleration for interactive 3D soft tissue cutting

To meet the requirement of computer-aided medical operations, apart from the real-time deformation, it is also necessary in the design to simulate the tissue cutting and suturing in a surgery simulation. In this paper, we present a model on topology change and deformation of soft tissue, referred to as the hybrid condensed finite element model, based on the volumetric finite element method. The most important advantage of our model is its ability to achieve an interactive frame rate for the topology change in surgical simulation on standard PC platform. This is achieved through two innovations. One is to apply the condensation technique, by fully calculating the volumetric deformation in the operation part while only calculating the surface nodes in the non-operation part. Secondly, the major calculation work in the Conjugate Gradient solver for cutting and deformation is migrated from the CPU to the contemporary GPU to promote the calculation. Test examples have been given to show the feasibility and efficiency of the model. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.