Point Primitives Based Virtual Surgery System

In order to achieve a high degree of visual realism in surgery simulation, we present a virtual surgery system framework, which is based on point primitives for the virtual surgery scene rendering and the biomechanical calculation of the soft tissue. To embody the superiority of this framework, two virtual surgery systems based on point primitives we developed are exhibited in this paper. Six critical functional modules were selected as representative of basic and advanced virtual surgery skill. These modules were: 1) point-based texture mapping; 2) deformation simulation; 3) cutting simulation; 4) tearing simulation; 5) dynamic texture mapping; and 6) 3-D display. These modules were elaborated by including working principle, execution process, and the performance of the algorithm. The experimental results have shown that point primitives-based virtual surgery systems obtained higher performance in terms of computational efficiency and rendering effect than traditional meshes-based virtual surgery system.