Toward realistic virtual surgical simulation: using heuristically parameterized anisotropic mass-spring model to simulate tissue mechanical responses

Mass-spring model is a popular method to simulate soft tissues in virtual surgery applications. However, the setting of appropriate model parameters to reproduce the real mechanical responses of the tissues, which is anisotropic in general, remains an issue. This paper presents a hybrid heuristic approach to identify the parameters by incorporating simulated annealing into genetic algorithms. The optimization process is performed with reference to the benchmarks obtained by applying continuum mechanics and the finite element method. Experiments are performed to evaluate the feasibility of the approach.