Modelling 3D semi-deformable tubes in real time

Numerical simulation of deformable objects is an important problem in biomechanical engineering and computational science. A significant class of problems in this area requires that the simulation results are presented both haptically and graphically in real time (an example being a medical training simulator based on virtual reality). In such cases various types of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency are implemented. Numerical procedures for modelling deformable objects, with respect to their efficiency, mainly belong to the following two classes: interactive methods (that are fast but have moderate accuracy), and continuum mechanics based methods (that are accurate, but generally not fully interactive). In this paper we present a numerical method based on oriented splines for the numerical simulation of semi-deformable tubes. The numerical results demonstrate both the accuracy and the interactivity of the proposed method, making it a suitable component of complex systems for interactive virtual reality simulations of biomechanical systems. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.