[vtkusers] Real-Time Soft Tissue Deformation

[Ryan Barr]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to implement Real-Time Soft Tissue Deformation in VTK and I was hoping to get some ideas/help from the community.

So far I have the following working real-time in VTK...

1) I use TetGen to tetrahedralize a vtkPolydata (assuming no triangle intersections) into a vtkUnstructuredGrid of vtkTetra cells.

2) Cutting, using a very rudimentary version described in "Removing tetrahedra from a manifold mesh" by Forest, using a vtkCellPicker.

3) Deformation of the model by simply moving the points of a cell selected by vtkCellPicker by a constant arbitrary distance, and then having all the points of the entire vtkUnstructuredGrid constantly trying to return to their origin during a vtkRenderWindowInteractor timer event (by once again moving a constant and arbitrary distance each time).

So my question is, I am stuck on implementing a Real-Time FEM (or Tensor-Mass or Mass-Spring) system into VTK. Does anyone have any suggestions, or can describe their own implementation?

Anyway, below are the papers I've found to be the most insightful, where Delingette's soft tissue modeling algorithms being the favored one.

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Clement Forest , Herve Delingette , Nicholas Ayache, Removing Tetrahedra from a Manifold Mesh. Proceedings of the Computer Animation, p.225, June 19-21, 2002

H. Delingette and N. Ayache. Soft Tissue Modeling for Surgery Simulation. Handbook of Numerical Analysis, pages 453 - 550. Elsevier, 2004.

M. Müller , J. Dorsey , L. McMillan , R. Jagnow , B. Cutler. Stable real-time deformations. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, July 21-22, 2002, San Antonio, Texas.

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Thanks,

Ryan Barr
Computer Engineering
University of British Columbia

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