Interactive dibection of digital organs based on metaballs

This paper describes an interactive dibection approach based on metaballs for digital organs in virtual surgery. For organ's geometry, we employ a novel hybrid model comprising both inner metaballs and high-resolution surface mesh with texture. Using metaballs, the organ interior is geometrically simplified via a set of overlapping spheres with different radii. For physical representation, we present a hybrid framework to interlink metaballs with moving least squares (MLS) based meshfree method. MLS enables the direct and rapid transition from metaballs to local nodal formulations in physical modeling. For soft tibue dibection, the nature of our MLS-driven meshfree method also facilitates adaptive topology modification and cutting surface reconstruction. As nodal points only exist temporarily in localized regions adjacent to the cutting path, our method could generate accurate cutting surface without sacrificing real-time computational efficiency.