Deforming a high-resolution mesh in real-time by mapping onto a low-resolution physical model

For interactive surgical simulation the physical model of the soft tissue needs to be solved in real-time. This limits the attainable model density to well below the desired mesh density for visual realism. Previous work avoids this problem by using a high-resolution visual mesh mapped onto a low-resolution physical model. We apply the same approach and present an computationally cheap implementation of a known algorithm to avoid texture artefacts caused by the mapping. We also introduce a spline-based algorithm to prevent groups of high-resolution vertices, mapped to the same low-resolution triangle, from exhibiting movements in which the underlying low-resolution structure can be recognised. The resulting mapping algorithm is very efficient, mapping 54,000 vertices in 8.5 ms on the CPU and in 0.88 ms on the GPU. Consequently, the density of the high-resolution visual mesh is limited only by the detail of the CT data from which the mesh was generated