A new deformable model for cataract eye surgery simulation

Fast, realistic physically based deformable models are required for real time Virtual Reality applications such as surgical simulators. The main focus of this paper is to introduce a new deformable model called NDM that is fast enough to allow interactive frame rates and plausible deformation. The NDM is integrated in an interactive Cataract Eye Surgery Simulator (CESS), which is used to model the deformation of eye tissues when it is manipulated with surgical instrument. The deformation is modelled as the transmission of the force from the manipulated vertex to its adjacent neighbors and from those neighbors to their neighbors and so on, also the deformation can be simulated locally or globally. The NDM is tested on virtual objects those modeled as a surface mesh. The model is implemented in C programming language and uses GLUT and GLUI for the graphical user interface, OpenGL for visualization, and runs on a single personal computer. The simulation results obtained from the proposed NDM shows that the later outperform the traditional mass spring model in term of computational time.