An FPGA platform for real-time simulation of tissue deformation

The simulation of soft tissue deformations has many practical uses in the medical field such as diagnosing medical conditions, training medical professionals and surgical planning. While there are many good computational models that are used in these simulations, carrying out the simulations is time consuming especially for large systems. In order to improve the performance of these simulators, field-programmable-gate-arrays (FPGA) based accelerators for carrying out Matrix-by-Vector multiplications (MVM), the core operation required for simulation, have been proposed recently. A better approach, yet, is to implement a full accelerator for carrying out all operations required for simulation on FPGA. In this paper we propose an FPGA accelerator tested for simulating soft-tissue deformation using finite-difference approximation of elastodynamics equations and conjugate-gradient inversion of sparse matrices. The resource and timing requirements show that this approach can achieve speeds capable of carrying out real-time simulation.