A Comparison of Some Model Order Reduction Methods for Fast Simulation of Soft Tissue Response using the Point Collocation-based Method of Finite Spheres (PCMFS).

In this paper we develop the Point Collocation-based Method of Finite Spheres (PCMFS) to simulate the viscoelastic response of soft biological tissues and evaluate the effectiveness of model order reduction methods such as modal truncation, Hankel optimal model and truncated balanced realization techniques for PCMFS. The PCMFS was developed in [1] as a physics-based technique for real time simulation of surgical procedures. It is a meshfree numerical method in which discretization is performed using a set of nodal points with approximation functions compactly supported on spherical subdomains centered at the nodes. The point collocation method is used as the weighted residual technique where the governing differential equations are directly applied at the nodal points. Since computational speed has a significant role in simulation of surgical procedures, model order reduction methods have been compared for relative gains in efficiency and computational accuracy. Of these methods, truncated balanced realization results in the highest accuracy while modal truncation results in the highest efficiency.