Cutting Simulation of Manifold Volumetric Meshes

One of the most difficult problem in surgical simulation consists in simulating the removal of soft tissue. This paper proposes an efficient method for locally refining and removing tetrahedra in a realtime surgical simulator. One of the key feature of this algorithm is that the tetrahedral mesh remains a 3-manifold volume during the cutting simulation. Furthermore, our approach minimizes the number of generated tetrahedra while trying to optimize their shape quality. The removal of tetrahedra is performed with a strategy which combines local refinement with the removal of neighboring tetrahedra when a topological singularity is found.