Using Mesh Cutting in an Interactive Podiatric Orthopaedic Surgery Simulator

Serious games are an established pedagogical tool, with applications in a wide variety of fields. Although this includes the area of medical training, there is currently no podiatric orthopaedic training simulator. We attempt to overcome one of the obstacles to the creation of this kind of simulator, namely how to simulate podiatric bone surgery. In order to simulate this surgery appropriately, it is necessary to be able to cut through a virtual representation of a patient's foot on-screen in realtime. We investigate several methods of cutting through simulated objects in general, and evaluate their usefulness in simulating real-time interactive bone surgery. We determine that none of these conventional methods are fully suitable and instead propose, develop and test a method using planar slicing of polyhedral mesh geometry.

In addition, we describe and test some optimizations to vertex and index buffer representations of polyhedral meshes. These optimizations alleviate a performance bottleneck constraining the speed at which progressive mesh modifications can be made, facilitating the near-real-time modi�cation rate required for simulating surgery. We also investigate the use of haptic feedback to simulate the feel of surgery, and employ two games technologies to increase the realism of the simulation: particle engines and stereoscopic 3D rendering.