Design of a FEM computation engine for real-time laparoscopic surgery simulation

We present the design of a computation engine for a real-time laparoscopic surgery simulator: Since this simulator requires realistic real-time and real-world behaviour a physically correct model of the biological system has to be used, which leads to FEM modeling of the organs. The requirements imposed by dynamic FEM calculations cannot be met with state of the art parallel computers, since they are not optimized for the special needs of the underlying algorithm. Based on these requirements, we are designing a parallel processing engine that optimally supports communicational and computational needs. To support concurrent development of soft- and hardware, we have developed a simulator for the target hardware which allows continuous monitoring of the overall system performance.