Surface Contact and Reaction Force Models for Laparoscopic Simulation

In surgery simulation, most existing methods assume that the contact between a virtual instrument and a soft tissue model occur at a single point. However, there is a gross approximation when simulating laparoscopic procedures since the instrument shaft is used in several surgical tasks. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for modeling the collision response of a soft tissue when interacting with a volumetric virtual instrument involving both the shaft and the tip of the instrument. The proposed method generates visually coherent mesh deformations and plausible force-feedback in a real-time surgical simulator even when the mesh geometry is irregular.