Section: New Results

Regional anaesthesia

Participants : Rémi Bessard Duparc, Stéphane Cotin.

The RASimAs project (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) is a European research project funded by the European Union's 7th Framework Program. It aims at providing a virtual reality simulator and assistant to doctors performing regional anaesthesia by developing the patient-specific Virtual Physiological Human models. Our work lead to the following journal article (submitted in Sept 2016) : Real-time error controlled adaptive mesh refinement: Application to needle insertion simulation.

This paper presents the first real-time discretization-error-driven adaptive finite element approach for corotational elasticity problems involving strain localization. We propose a hexahedron-based finite element method, combined with a posteriori error estimation driven local h-refinement, for simulating soft tissue deformation. This enables to control the local error and global error level in the mechanical fields (e.g. displacement or gradient) during the simulation. The local error level is used to refine the mesh only where it is needed, while maintaining a coarser mesh elsewhere. We investigate the convergence of the algorithm on academic examples, and demonstrate its practical usability on a percutaneous procedure involving needle insertion in soft tissues.

2016 was the third year of the project during which we developed new models of the biomechanics of the leg and arm, as well as the simulation of the insertion of the anaesthesiology needle.

See the RASimAs web site for more details.