GPU-friendly gallbladder modeling in laparoscopic cholecystectomy surgical training system

A challenge in virtual reality based laparoscopic cholecystectomy simulation is to construct a fast and accurate deformable gallbladder model. This paper proposed a multi-layered mass-spring model which can adapt well to the built-in accelerating algorithms in PhysX-Engine of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The gallbladder was first segmented from clinical Computed Tomography (CT) images. From the segmentation result, a surface mesh of a gallbladder was constructed. The inner layers of a mass-spring model were generated from the surface mesh based on the anatomical structure of gallbladder. We configured the parameters of the springs based on the biomechanical properties of gallbladder to ensure the reality of the deformation results. Preliminary experiments demonstrated that our model was able to achieve satisfactory results in terms of both visual perception and time performance.

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► A simple but efficient bi-modular viscoelastic modeling method was proposed to simulate the biomechanical behavior of gallbladder.
► A robotic assistive practice and an assessment technology were integrated to mimic a master-apprentice learning process.
► PhysX-Engine of GPU was used to accelerate the mass-spring deformation.
► Experimental results revealed that our model supported the real-time surgical simulation.