Section: New Results

Preconditioner-Based Contact Response and Application to Cataract Surgery

We introduced a new method to compute, in real- time, the physical behavior of several colliding soft-tissues in a surgical simulation. The numerical approach is based on finite element modeling and allows for a fast update of a large number of tetrahedral elements. The speed-up is obtained by the use of a specific preconditioner that is updated at low frequency. The preconditioning enables an optimized computation of both large deformations and precise contact response. Moreover, homogeneous and inhomogeneous tissues are simulated with the same accuracy. This method was used in a simulation of one step in a cataract surgery procedure, which require to handle contacts with non homogeneous objects precisely. This work was presented at MICCAI 2011 [17] .

Figure 7. Simulation of the extraction of the eye lens during Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery (MSICS).