Abstract
In percutaneous puncture simulation, the finite element method is usually used to compute the needle bend and tissue deformation. This method, however, tends to be not suitable for real-time applications such as training systems due to its high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel deformable model with a low computational cost. The proposed model reproduces needle bend and tissue deformation in the direction perpendicular to the long axis of the needle. The proposed model consists of a soft tissue deformation model based on the Long Element Method (LEM) and a needle bending model which is designed to be consistent with the tissue model. The parameters for both models are put in the same simultaneous equation to be solved for the simulation. We verified that the proposed model shows a low computational cost by the computer simulation. The accuracy of the model was also evaluated by the experiment using needles and tissue phantoms. The experimental result using only needles showed that a bend could be estimated by the pre-optimized parameters. The optimized parameters were available even if different displacement was given to the manipulated point of the needle.
