Bleeding Simulation With Improved Visual Effects for Surgical Simulation Systems

In surgical simulation, the Navier-Stokes (N-S) equation is commonly employed to imitate the physical characteristics of bleeding and the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPHs) algorithm is applied to solve the numerical solution of the N-S equation. However, blood is viscous, incompressible and non-Newtonian fluid whose physical properties cannot be fully incorporated by the simple N-S equation, and the kernel approximation of the SPH algorithm may lead to both edge and volume distortions plus high computational cost. In this paper, both the tension force and the effect of platelets on the viscous force of bleeding particles are incorporated into the N-S equation in order to render more realistic visual effect and biological features of bleeding in surgical simulation. Constant core radius of the kernel function of the SPH algorithm is substituted with a function of particle density, avoiding potential edge distortions in simulating bleeding area. A repulsive force between particles is introduced, which effectively prevents volume distortions. Besides, accelerated search for particles based on the cube mesh improves the computational efficiency. The simulation results show that the presented simulation method leads to smooth bleeding surface and improves the visual effects of edge and volume in comparison with existing methods, and relatively high computational efficiency can be achieved as well.