Facial surgery simulation using 3D bubble mesh

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the simulation of facial changes after removing some part of a bone in the face. It uses a spring network model in order to represent the facial tension after surgery. It is shown that a spring network model works better when node distances in the model are uniformly equal. The first part of the paper describes how to allocate nodes at equal distances using a bubble-mesh scheme, which has been utilized in CAD/CAM. Nodes should move along the facial surface continuously. But the first technique utilized was to let the nodes move only on a limited number of discrete points. The second technique was to start with an overcrowded initial condition and to reduce excess nodes so as to reduce computation time. Using the network model, we successfully performed a surgery simulation experiment and produced a facial image which was quite similar to that of an actual patient after facial surgery. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 32(1): 1–9, 2001