Haptic simulation of tissue tearing during surgery.

We present a method for the real-time, interactive simulation of tissue tearing during laparoscopic surgery. The method is designed to work at haptic feedback rates (ie, around 1 kHz). Tissue tearing is simulated under the general framework of continuum damage mechanics. The problem is stated as a general, multidimensional parametric problem, which is solved by means of proper generalized decomposition methods. One of the main novelties is the reduction of history-dependent problems, such as damage mechanics, by resorting to an approach in which a reduced-order field of initial damage values is considered as a parameter of the formulation. We focus on the laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedure as a general example of the performance of the method.