The Visible Ear Simulator website is available. Download of the free-ware version will be available soon: http://www.alexandra.dk/ves/
The real-time simulation of congenital heart surgery has been a research project since 2003. We have successfully designed and implemented a very detailed cardiac surgical simulation through the utilization of the GPU for general purpose calculations, e.g. soft tissue deformation, displacement mapping and haptic feedback. We have written a number of papers on these subject (see http://www.jespermosegaard.dk/Publications). The research project was a collaboration between computer scientists and surgeons from Aarhus, London and Tübingen.