GPU Accelerated Surgical Simulators for Complex Morphology

Abstract

Surgical training in virtual environments, surgical simulation in other words, has previously had difficulties in simulating deformation of complex morphology in real-time. Even fast spring-mass based systems had slow convergence rates for large models. This paper presents two methods to accelerate a spring-mass system in order to simulate a complex organ such as the heart. Computations are accelerated by taking advantage of modern graphics processing units (GPUs). Two GPU implementations are presented. They vary in their generality of spring connections and in the speedup factor they achieve.