Real-time Collision Detection for
Virtual Surgery

Jean-Christophe Lombardo,
EPIDAURE/SINUS, INRIA, 2004 route de Lucioles,
06192 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Jean-Christophe.Lombardo@sophia.inria.fr - Marie-Paule Cani and Fabrice Neyret
iMAGIS$^\dagger$-GRAVIR / IMAG
BP 53, 38041 Grenoble cedex 09, France
Marie-Paule.Cani@imag.fr

Abstract:

We present a simple method for performing real-time collision detection in a virtual surgery environment. The method relies on the graphics hardware for testing the interpenetration between a virtual deformable organ and a rigid tool controlled by the user. The method enables to take into account the motion of the tool between two consecutive time steps. For our specific application, the new method runs about a hundred times faster than the well known oriented-bounding-boxes tree method [5].

Keywords: Collision detection, Virtual Reality, Physically-based simulation, Graphics hardware.