Real-time Simulation for 3D Tissue Deformation with CUDA Based GPU Computing

The medical training systems based on virtual simulation are highly desired since minimally invasive surgical techniques have become popular to patients. The training system helps surgeon trainees to acquire, practice and evaluate their surgical skills, and the key component of such a system is to simulate the dynamic procedure such as 3D biological tissue deformation in surgical operation. In our paper, an improved mass-spring model is proposed to represent the biological tissue surface, during which the virtual spring is introduced and utilized to help compensate the weakness of the conventional mass-spring model. Then Verlet integration is adopted to calculate the position of mass points during the deformation process without explicit computation of the velocity values. Finally the bilinear interpolation method is employed to generate one smooth mesh to render the deformed tissue surface. To speed up the simulation performance for surgical tissue deformation, CUDA based GPU computing is adopted, while related data structures and algorithm are designed and implemented for the parallel computation. Our method has been tested by experiments and it can generate realistic biological tissue deformation images. Compared with CPU, our approach can be performed in real time. Therefore, the proposed method in our paper is an effective and practical way for tissue deformation of medical training system.