Simulation of Surgical Cutting Using a Progressive Cutting Scheme and Extended Finite Element Method

Accuracy and speed are two of the most important problems in the real-time Finite Element Method (FEM)-based simulations of surgical cutting [1][2]. While the latter can be gradually eased through GPU-based acceleration[3][4], the former hasn't been properly addressed even until recently. To enable realistic and accurate simulation, the cutting line should follow the exact movement of the user-controlled virtual scalpel in real-time. However problems in the collision detection and the cutting scheme can easily result a wrong response such as 1) Elements have been cutted before virtual scalpel's arrival, 2) an obvious lag between the virtual scalpel and the model modification. A progressive cutting scheme was proposed in recent years to minimise the lag problem[5]. But it is based on the mesh subdivision in a standard FEM approach. Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) which has the advantage of modeling arbitrary cuts without modifying the underlying mesh is favoured in this work over the standard FEM [6][7][8]. This work seeks to improve the simulation of surgical cutting by combining both a progressive scheme and xFEM. Experiments based on the (Simulation Open Framework Architecture) have successfully demonstrated the surgical cutting simulation with the proposed idea.