Simulating soft tissues using a GPU approach of the mass-spring model

The recent advances in the fields such as modeling bio-mechanics of living tissues, haptic technologies, computational capacity, and graphics realism have created conditions necessary in order to develop effective surgical training using virtual environments. However, virtual simulators need to meet two requirements, they need to be real-time and highly realistic. The most expensive computational task in a surgical simulator is that of the physical model. The physical model is the component responsible to simulate the deformation of the anatomical structures and the most important factor in order to obtain realism. In this paper we present a novel approach to virtual surgery. The novelty comes in two forms: specifically a highly realistic mass-spring model, and a GPU based technique, and analysis, that provides a nearly 80x speedup over serial execution and 20x speedup over CPU based parallel execution. ©2010 IEEE