Organ Texture Synthesis for Virtual Reality-Based Surgical Simulators

Virtual Reality-based simulators is an important tool for surgical skills training and assessment. In general, the degree of realism experienced by the trainees is determined by the visual and biomechanical fidelity of the simulator. Organ textures can greatly affect visual realism and hence the overall quality of the simulation. In this paper, we use a very simple algorithm that can efficiently synthesize a wide variety of organ textures. The algorithm uses pixel-based texture synthesize technology. For each pixel in the output image, an L-shaped neighborhood of current pixel of a specific size is considered. Each pixel from this neighborhood generates a ¿shifted¿ candidate pixel according to its original position in the input texture. The best pixel is chosen with a neighborhood most similar to the current L-shaped neighborhood in the output image. This method is fast and its implementation is straightforward. The experiment results show the algorithm is feasility and validity.