A Brain Surgery Simulator

Abstract

A proposed real-time neurosurgery simulator handles skull drilling and surgical interaction with the brain. This involves the development and combination of areas such as collision handling, haptic rendering, physical simulation, and volumetric visualization. The simulator's input data comes from computed-tomography and magnetic-resonance-imaging images of the patients. Collision detection for drilling uses only density data; collision detection for interaction with the brain is based on uniform spatial subdivision of a tetrahedral mesh. To take advantage of all the information, the simulator employs visualization methods such as volumetric isosurfaces and deformable volume rendering.