Section: New Results

Shells

Many tissues in human body have thin structure and may be seen as surfaces or at least be modeled as such. Deformation modeling of surfaces is a topic with wide area of applications especially in computer graphics. However, many of the previously presented techniques are not applicable to the area of surgical simulations where a more physically based approach is desired.

To address this problem we present a new model of shell elements based on the formulation of Bézier triangles. To reduce the number of necessary degrees of freedom a kinematic link between nodes inside the element is defined. Furthermore, using implicit integration scheme allows us to achieve interactive frame rate of the simulation.

The applicability of the model has been validated on a prototype of simulator for preoperative planning of surgery of congenital heart diseases.