Deformable Models for Surgical Simulation: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews current deformable models used in surgical simulation, analyzing their methodologies, challenges, and future directions for realistic soft tissue modeling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of deformable models for surgical simulation, highlighting existing challenges and research gaps.

Findings

Classifies deformable models into three main categories.

Discusses modeling of tissue anisotropy, viscoelasticity, and compressibility.

Identifies key challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of the state-of-the-art deformable models studied in the literature concerning soft tissue deformable modeling for interactive surgical simulation. It first introduces the challenges of surgical simulation, followed by discussions and analyses on the deformable models, which are classified into three categories: the heuristic modeling methodology, continuum-mechanical methodology, and other methodologies. It also examines linear and nonlinear deformable modeling, model internal forces, and numerical time integrations, together with modeling of soft tissue anisotropy, viscoelasticity, and compressibility. Finally, various issues in the existing deformable models are discussed to outline the remaining challenges of deformable models in surgical simulation.