Hello there,
some friends of mine asked me advice about making a medical simulation.
This software should simulate a laparoscopy surgery (cholecystectomy) in a pretty detailed way. They need to simulate the clamp, pull and rip of a tissue, something like what you see in the video below.
Having done just some bones-based animation, I’m a bit puzzled about using Unity for that.
So, I need some opinions. Can unity be used to make something like that? And if so, what should I know, which plugins should I check to start?
I really need some directions, just to understand if that’s even a road worth taking.
Thank you!
There seems to be more going on depending on which vertex is affected however; the pouch behaves differently than the flesh it’s attached to. There is per-vertex bleeding (I’m guessing a vascularity level to emulate cutting through veiny parts) and burn propagation to cauterize. Lots of stuff per vertex, so there is some complex simulation involved.
Unity can RENDER what is going on, but this video shows a compelling underlying simulation of skin, tissue, physics, connectivity, plasticity, etc… If you want a plugin capability for that, contact the vendor or others like them and buy their simulation toolkit.
The only things really special here are the flexibility of the tissue and the ability to cut and/or rip it. You’d need code for those and I don’t think there’s anything like it in the Asset Store.
However, there are already some things that will let you stretch and reshape meshes, as well as some that let you slice meshes into pieces. This is a little more complicated, but should be do-able, with some work.
If it were my project, I’d have issues with how disturbingly realistic it is, though. lol
This is the subject of several research papers, a couple of which are availableonline. To put it mildly, this is not going to be easy, and Unity won’t be able to help with much beyond the rendering of the final simulated meshes. Think of it as simulating dynamic fracturing on soft bodies in real time.
I’m afraid I’d have to agree with shaderop. Unity’s physics cloth system just doesn’t support the fidelity and accuracy of collisions that would be necessary to simulate something as complex as what’s shown in that video. You might be able to build something that roughly approximates that sort of operation in Unity/PhysX physics but that’s probably all you’d be able to do (physics wise). You’d have to build your own physics system or license one that could handle this and then adapt it to Unity. To be honest, I don’t know of any game engine that supports complex softbody simulations of this magnitude out of the box.
I now this is an OLD post, but I am interested in doing exactly what kurai wanted to do years ago, using also the oculus rift and haptic devices, both being now supported.
We need to simulate FLS tasks or any other medical surgery, and I was wondering if today the physics engine in Unity would allow use to reproduce those complex simulations?
