The Simulation of Delineation and Splitting in Virtual Liver Surgery

We introduce a novel method to simulate the delineation and splitting procedure in virtual liver surgery. Liver splitting surgery, which plays an important role in treatment of liver cancer, is difficult for surgeons to implement due to the complexity on both visual and hap tic aspects. The splitting of liver paranchyma is the key step of the whole surgery, while the delineation of splitting area is the premise of splitting phase by indicating which part of the liver should be cut. In this paper, to make the simulator perform realistically, an algorithm for geodesics computation in triangle mesh is improved and a new splitting model is proposed. During the delineation phase, we collect the points when virtual electrotome moving around on the liver surface and compute the geodesics of adjacent points in real-time. In the splitting phase, we reconstruct the healthy and lesion liver model respectively in preprocessing stage. The normal and deformation model updates when virtual electrotome touch the wound surface. Results show our techniques can provide a stable and realistic simulation for virtual surgeries. Moreover, it can also be used in other graphics applications.