Soft tissue deformation with neural dynamics for surgery simulation

Abstract

Soft tissue deformation is of great importance to virtual-reality-based-surgery simulation. This paper presents a new neural-dynamics-based methodology for simulation of soft tissue deformation from the perspective of energy propagation. A novel neural network is established to propagate the energy generated by an external force among mass points of a soft tissue. The stability of the proposed neural network system is proved by using the Lyapunov stability theory. A potential-based method is presented to derive the internal forces from the natural energy distribution established by the neural dynamics. Integration with a haptic device has been achieved for interactive deformation simulation with force feedback. The proposed methodology not only accommodates isotropic, anisotropic and inhomogeneous materials by simple modification of the control coefficients, but it also accepts large-range deformations.