Facial surgery simulation using finite element modeling

We design a three-dimensional facial surgical simulation system, which predicts the patient's post-surgical appearance from his CT volume data. The general steps adopted in this system include data acquisition, image preprocessing, 3D reconstruction, simulation, and visualization. In order to predict surgical results well, we adopt finite element modeling to estimate the simulation outcome. For surgical simulation, we utilize the isopammetric hexahedron finite element model to represent the facial structure manipulated during the surgical operation. Isopammetric hexahedron element is a more flexible and accurate element type than the tetrahedron one, which was used for surgical simulation in other literatures. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to simulate facial surgery effectively.