Abstract: In order to solve collision detection problem in virtual surgery，a rapid collision detection method based on bounding volume hierarchy is presented.Focusing on the features of the large-scale soft tissue model and the simple geometric instrument model，the algorithm is improved from three aspects：the construction of the bounding volume hierarchy，the traversal of bounding volume hierarchy and the precise intersection test.Compared to the RAPID library，the experiments show that the algorithm is more available and efficient to the collision detection with increasing the size of soft model in virtual surgery.