Ph.D. - Medical Image Registration and Surgery Simulation Real-time deformation for surgery simulation

The goal of this project was to develop tools for physicians enabling them to practice difficult surgery or evaluate results of different approaches on a virtual patient.

One aspect of simulation is real-time simulation of Laparacospy, where the surgeon operate on the patient using instruments inserted through the skin.

The main challenge of this work was to find ways to simulate solid volumetric bodies in real-time. I did this using FEM models and special techniques for energy minimization. Below you can see images from a demo that I made, showing an operating room and deformation of a lower leg.

If you have a VRML viewer, you can take a Virtual Walk in the Operating Room.

• M. Bro-Nielsen: Finite element modeling in medical VR, Journal of the IEEE, 86(3):490-503, 1998
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Fast finite elements for surgery simulation, Proc. Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 5 (MMVR-5'97), 1997
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Surgery simulation using fast finite elements, Proc. Visualization in Biomedical Computing (VBC'96), Hamburg, Germany, September, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1131, pp. 529-534, 1996
• M. Bro-Nielsen and S. Cotin: Real-time volumetric deformable models for surgery simulation using finite elements and condensation, Computer Graphics Forum, 15(3):57-66 (Eurographics'96), 1996
• S. Cotin, H. Delingette, J.M. Clément, M. Bro-Nielsen, N. Ayache, J. Marescaux: Geometrical and Physical Representations for a Simulator of Hepatic Surgery, Proc. Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 4 (MMVR-4), San Diego, California, January 17-20, pp. 139-151, 1996
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Soft tissue modelling in surgery simulation for prediction of results of craniofacial operations & steps towards virtual reality training systems, Proc. 3rd Int. Workshop on Rapid Prototyping in Medicine & Computer-Assisted Surgery, 1995
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Modelling Elasticity in Solids using Active Cubes - Application to Simulated Operations, Proc. Computer Vision, Virtual Reality, and Robotics in Medicine (CVRMed'95), Nice, France, April, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 905, pp. 535-541, 1995
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Active Nets and Cubes, IMM Tech. Rep. 94-13, 1994