This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Surgery Simulation and Soft Tissue Modeling, IS4TM 2003, held in Juan-Les-Pins, France in June 2003. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on soft tissue models, haptic rendering, cardiac modeling, and patient specific simulators.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Surgery Simulation and Soft Tissue Modeling, IS4TM 2003, held in Juan-Les-Pins, France in June 2003. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on soft tissue models, haptic rendering, cardiac modeling, and patient specific simulators.

This volume focuses on the biomechanical modeling of biological tissues in the context of Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS). More specifically, deformable soft tissues are addressed since they are the subject of the most recent developments in this field. The pioneering works on this CAS topic date from the 1980's, with applications in orthopaedics and biomechanical models of bones. More recently, however, biomechanical models of soft tissues have been proposed since most of the human body is made of soft organs that can be deformed by the surgical gesture. Such models are much more complicated to handle since the tissues can be subject to large deformations (non-linear geometrical framework) as well as complex stress/strain relationships (non-linear mechanical framework). Part 1 of the volume presents biomechanical models that have been developed in a CAS context and used during surgery. This is particularly new since most of the soft tissues models already proposed concern Computer Assisted Planning, with a pre-operative use of the models. Then, the volume addresses the two key issues raised for an intra-operative use of soft tissues models, namely (Part 2) “how to estimate the in vivo mechanical behavior of the tissues?” (i.e. what are the values of the mechanical parameters that can deliver realistic patient-specific behavior?) and (Part 3) “how to build a modeling platform that provides generic real-time (or at least interactive-time) numerical simulations?”

The objectives of this project were to develop computer based models of soft tissues that could eventually be integrated into virtual reality-based surgical simulators. To that end, we have developed a number of computer algorithms that span the scales from the microstructural to the phenomenological, and from 1-D to 3-D. For the 1-D case, we have developed a model of fractional order viscoelasticity. For the 3-D case, we have developed an invariant-based formulation of dispersed isotropy and implemented it in a model of blood vessel. Although the later employs as statistical measure of fiber dispersion, both a essentially phenomenological models. To implement tissue microstructure, we developed a micromechanical model based on the General Method of Cells. Through this model, we were able to model fiber-matrix interactions explicitly. These models are currently being validated and implemented into larger organ simulations.

This book provides a real-time and knowledge-based fuzzy logic model for soft tissue deformation. The demand for surgical simulation continues to grow, as there is a major bottleneck in surgical simulation designation and every patient is unique. Deformable models, the core of surgical simulation, play a crucial role in surgical simulation designation. Accordingly, this book (1) presents an improved mass spring model to simulate soft tissue deformation for surgery simulation; (2) ensures the accuracy of simulation by redesigning the underlying Mass Spring Model (MSM) for liver deformation, using three different fuzzy knowledge-based approaches to determine the parameters of the MSM; (3) demonstrates how data in Central Processing Unit (CPU) memory can be structured to allow coalescing according to a set of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-dependent alignment rules; and (4) implements heterogeneous parallel programming for the distribution of grid threats for Computer Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)-based GPU computing.

This book contains the written contributions to the International Symposium on th Medical Simulation (ISMS’04) held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA on June 17 th and June 18 , 2004. Manuscripts are organized around five thematic sections relating to the multidisciplinary field of Medical Simulation: Soft Tissue Properties and Modeling, Haptic Rendering, Real-Time Deformable Models, Anatomical Modeling, and Development Frameworks. The objectives of the symposium are to gather researchers to present their most recent, and promising work, to highlight research trends and foster dialogue and debates among participants. Live demonstrations are also included at the meeting, but cannot be included in this volume. Finally, to address questions about areas for improvement and future directions of the field, we organized a panel of experts including technical, medical and educational representatives. This event continues the successful symposium organized by Hervé Delingette and Nicholas Ayache, in France in June 2003. At that meeting we agreed that it would be beneficial for the community to have an annual gathering for the medical simulation community where researchers can exchange ideas and share their work in this emerging field. ISMS’04 is co-organized by CIMIT / Harvard Medical School and Rutgers University.

"This dissertation presents a framework on developing geometrical modeling and physically based modeling methods towards a virtual reality based surgery simulation system. The development of simulation is divided into two aspects: (1) virtual bone (hard tissue) surgery, and (2) virtual soft tissue surgery...Also, this dissertation presents a study on physically based modeling and simulation of soft tissue deformation, with the goal of producing realistic, real-time effects during simulation"--Abstract, leaf iii.