Towards Realistic Surgical Simulation and Training Systems

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At present, surgical residents acquire and develop hands-on skills mainly through trials on animals, cadavers and patients. There are, however, obvious disadvantages to these conventional training approaches: animals have different anatomies from humans; cadavers are unable to provide appropriate physiological responses; it is risky when students practice on patients.****    With recent advances in haptics and computer graphics, visual reality based surgical simulation is rapidly emerging and increasingly perceived as a valuable addition to, or replacement of, traditional training methods. Simulators can generate virtual patients with realistic human anatomy and physiological responses, potentially providing a risk-free training environment with the possibility of unlimited training over a wide range of pathologies. In addition to these benefits, new and complex surgical procedures can be practiced safely on a simulator before proceeding to patients; students can practice on their own schedules; training sessions can be stored and later reviewed by physicians.****    While a small number of companies are starting to offer surgical simulation training systems of varying quality, no simulators are able to provide a sufficiently high degree of resemblance to real-life surgery. There still exist numerous fundamental challenges and technical difficulties, such as the dexterity of haptic interfaces, accuracy of virtual patient models, collision modelling, real-time and immersive visualization of the operating scene, etc. ***    In this research, we propose to develop principles, algorithms and tools that are essential to realize highly realistic surgical simulation, enabling medical institutions to train surgeons using simulators. Due to the broad scope of potential research topics, we limit our efforts to a subset of problems including: 1. haptic feedback, 2. tissue modelling, and 3.validation criteria. At the end, the anticipated results will be integrated and validated by the development of a cricothyroidotomy simulator.***