AMPS: A Real-time Mesh Cutting Algorithm for Surgical Simulations

Abstract: We present the AMPS algorithm, a finite element solution method that combines principal submatrix updates and Schur complement techniques, well-suited for interactive simulations of deformation and cutting of finite element meshes. Our approach features real-time solutions to the updated stiffness matrix systems to account for interactive changes in mesh connectivity and boundary conditions. Updates are accomplished by an augmented matrix formulation of the stiffness equations to maintain its consistency with changes to the underlying model without refactorization at each timestep. As changes accumulate over multiple simulation timesteps, the augmented solution algorithm enables tens or hundreds of updates per second. Acceleration schemes that exploit sparsity, memoization and parallelization lead to the updates being computed in real-time. The complexity analysis and experimental results for this method demonstrate that it scales linearly with the problem size. Results for cutting and deformation of 3D elastic models are reported for meshes with node counts up to 50,000, and involve models of astigmatism surgery and the brain.