Virtual surgical bleeding simulation with navier-stokes equation and modified smooth particle hydrodynamics method

Abstract

In surgery, tissue and organ bleeding is common and unavoidable. Adding bleeding simulation to virtual surgery can greatly improve the visual realism of the surgical environment, and can also train surgeons' reactions to surgical bleeding. Blood is a kind of viscous and incompressible liquid, and has unique mechanical properties due to the existence of platelets and other cells. The Navier-Stokes (N-S) equation is often used to study the physical properties of blood, and the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is usually adopted to obtain the numerical solution of the N-S equation by kernel approximation. However, constant core radius of the traditional SPH will lead to edge distortions of the simulated bleeding area. In this paper, traditional N-S equation is improved to better conform to the physical characteristics of blood. Besides, the constant core radius of the traditional SPH is replaced with a function of particle density. The simulation results show that the proposed bleeding model has better realistic behavior than using the traditional SPH.