Dan Morris, Stanford University, USA

Originally posted on www.simulia.com

Our work focuses on virtual environments for surgery: we'd like surgeons to be able to "rehearse" procedures virtually before entering a real operating room. One hard problem in this space is simulating how soft tissues behave when you touch them; this is a computationally-demanding simulation that's hard to do in real-time. Accurate systems (typically finite element models) are too slow to be interactive, fast systems (typically mass-spring models) are inaccurate. This project merged the best of both worlds by using a finite element deformation model (simulated using the Abaqus FEA product suite) to "teach" an interactive deformation model how to deform via parameter optimization.