Virtual reality simulations can be used for training of surgery procedures such as needle insertion. Using a haptic force-feedback de- vice a realistic virtual environment can be provided by computation of forces for specific patient data. This work presents an algorithm to cal- culate and visualize deformations of volumetric data representing soft- tissue inspired by the relaxation step of the ChainMail algorithm. It uses the coupling of haptic force-feedback computation and the deformation visualization algorithm to enhance the visual experience of our needle insertion training simulation. Real-time performance is achieved by im- plementing the relaxation on the GPU which outperforms a CPU-based implementation.
['Dirk Fortmeier', 'Andre Mastmeyer', 'Heinz Handels']
GPU-Based Visualization of Deformable Volumetric Soft-Tissue for Real-Time Simulation of Haptic Needle Insertion