Connective Tissues Simulation on GPU

Abstract

Recent work in the field of medical simulation have led to real advances in the mechanical simulation of organs. However, it is important to notice that, despite the major role they may have in the interaction between organs, the connective tissues are often left out of these simulations. In this paper, we propose a model which can rely on either a mesh based or a meshless methods. To provide a realistic simulation of these tissues, our work is based on the weak form of continuum mechanics equations for hyperelastic soft materials. Furthermore, the stability of deformable objects simulation is ensured by an implicit temporal integration scheme. Our method allows to model these tissues without prior assumption on the dimension of their of their geometry (curve, surface or volume), and enables mechanical coupling between organs. To obtain an interactive frame rate, we develop a parallel version suitable for to GPU computation. Finally we demonstrate the proper convergence of our finite element scheme.