Virtual Model of the Human Brain for Neurosurgical Simulation

The aim of this work is to develop a realistic virtual model of the human brain that could be used in a neurosurgical simulation for both educational and preoperative planning purposes. The goal of such a system would be to enhance the practice of surgery students, avoiding the use of animals, cadavers and plastic phantoms. A surgeon, before carrying out the real procedure, will, with this system, be able to rehearse by using a surgical simulator based on detailed virtual reality models of the human brain, reconstructed with real patient's medical images. In order to obtain a realistic and useful simulation we focused our research on the physical modelling of the brain as a deformable body and on the interactions with surgical instruments. The developed prototype is based on the mass-spring-damper model and, in order to obtain deformations similar to the real ones, a three tiered structure has been built. In this way, we have obtained local and realistic deformations using an ad-hoc point distribution in the volume where the contact between the brain surface and a surgical instrument takes place.

[1]  Christian Laugier,et al.  Modeling Human Tissues for Medical Simulators , 2000 .

[2]  Herve Delingette,et al.  Real-Time Elastic Deformations of Soft Tissues for Surgery Simulation , 1999, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[3]  Norberto F. Ezquerra,et al.  Interactively deformable models for surgery simulation , 1993, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[4]  Alan Liu,et al.  Bounds for damping that guarantee stability in mass-spring systems. , 2006, Studies in health technology and informatics.

[5]  Uwe G. Kühnapfel,et al.  Endoscopic surgery training using virtual reality and deformable tissue simulation , 2000, Computers & graphics.

[6]  M.G. Fujie,et al.  Real-Time Simulation for Intra-Operative Navigation in Robotic Surgery; Using a mass spring system for a basic study of organ deformation , 2007, 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[7]  Norberto F. Ezquerra,et al.  Interactively deformable models for surgery simulation : Graphics in medicine , 1993 .

[8]  Andrew Nealen,et al.  Physically Based Deformable Models in Computer Graphics , 2006, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[9]  Sarah F. Frisken.  3D Chainmail: A Fast Algorithm for Deforming Volumetric Objects , 1997, SI3D.

[10]  SimulationHervé Delingetteinria.  Towards Realistic Soft Tissue Modeling in Medical , 1997 .

[11]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Real-time simulation of deformable objects: tools and application , 2001, Proceedings Computer Animation 2001. Fourteenth Conference on Computer Animation (Cat. No.01TH8596).