Soft Tissue Modeling for Virtual Surgery Simulation

Nowadays on medical and healthcare areas, training and learning methods for surgeons are based on skills development. In order to improve this learning process, virtual reality simulators have been proposed due its capacity to reproduce surgical procedures without any risk or harm on patient. These devices represent a wide research area that involves multiple fields of knowledge, such as mechatronics, computational mechanics and information technology. In this work are exposed the improvements for soft tissue modeling on the virtual environment of an opensource laparoscopic surgery simulator. In this paper, the Exoskeleton Structure (ES) method was developed and applied on a 3D mesh in order to create interactive simulations for concave geometries on the simulation core. Moreover, the Equivalent Strain Energy Density (ESED) model was implemented, showing good performance in prediction of soft tissue behavior on preliminary results for a one-dimensional element on uniaxial testing. These results validate the application of both proposals for soft tissue modeling on the development of real-time surgery simulations.