Purpose: In surgical navigation, pre-operative organ models are presented to surgeons during the intervention to help them in efficiently finding their target. In the case of soft tissue, these models need to be deformed and adapted to the current situation by using intra-operative sensor data. A promising method to realize this are real-time capable biomechanical models. Methods: We train a fully convolutional neural network to estimate a displacement field of all points inside an organ when given only the displacement of a part of the organ's surface. The network trains on entirely synthetic data of random organ-like meshes, which allows us to generate much more data than is otherwise available. The input and output data is discretized into a regular grid, allowing us to fully utilize the capabilities of convolutional operators and to train and infer in a highly parallelized manner. Results: The system is evaluated on in-silico liver models, phantom liver data and human in-vivo breathing data. We test the performance with varying material parameters, organ shapes and amount of visible surface. Even though the network is only trained on synthetic data, it adapts well to the various cases and gives a good estimation of the internal organ displacement. The inference runs at over 50 frames per second. Conclusions: We present a novel method for training a data-driven, real-time capable deformation model. The accuracy is comparable to other registration methods, it adapts very well to previously unseen organs and does not need to be re-trained for every patient. The high inferring speed makes this method useful for many applications such as surgical navigation and real-time simulation.
Our method is inspired by the work of @cite_21 , who have used neural networks to estimate the results of fluid dynamics simulations for real-time applications. One major difference is that fluid dynamics are often computed on regular grids with a fixed number of cells which makes them easier to handle with neural networks. In contrast to this, we need to re-sample the irregular simulation domain before we pass the data to the network.
@cite_21
2515505748
Physically based fluid simulation requires much time in numerical calculation to solve Navier-Stokes equations. Especially in grid-based fluid simulation, because of iterative computation, the projection step is much more time-consuming than other steps. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven projection method using an artificial neural network to avoid iterative computation. Once the grid resolution is decided, our data-driven method could obtain projection results in relatively constant time per grid cell, which is independent of scene complexity. Experimental results demonstrated that our data-driven method drastically speeded up the computation in the projection step. With the growth of grid resolution, the speed-up would increase strikingly. In addition, our method is still applicable in different fluid scenes with some alterations, when computational cost is more important than physical accuracy. Copyright  2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.