Background: Realistic and real-time modeling and simulation of soft tissue deformation is a fundamental research issue in the field of surgical simulation.
Objective: In this paper, a novel cellular neural network approach is presented for modeling and simulation of soft tissue deformation by combining neural dynamics of cellular neural network with ChainMail mechanism.
Method: The proposed method formulates the problem of elastic deformation into cellular neural network activities to avoid the complex computation of elasticity. The local position adjustments of ChainMail are incorporated into the cellular neural network as the local connectivity of cells, through which the dynamic behaviors of soft tissue deformation are transformed into the neural dynamics of cellular neural network.
Results: Experiments demonstrate that the proposed neural network approach is capable of modeling the soft tissues' nonlinear deformation and typical mechanical behaviors.
Conclusions: The proposed method not only improves ChainMail's linear deformation with the nonlinear characteristics of neural dynamics but also enables the cellular neural network to follow the principle of continuum mechanics to simulate soft tissue deformation.
Keywords: ChainMail method; Surgical simulation; cellular neural network; real-time performance; soft tissue deformation.