Towards Realistic Surgical Simulation and Training Systems

目前，外科住院医师主要通过动物、尸体和病人的试验来获得和发展实践技能。然而，这些传统的训练方法也有明显的缺点：动物的解剖结构与人类不同;尸体无法提供适当的生理反应;学生在病人身上练习时有风险。 随着触觉和计算机图形学的最新进展，基于视觉现实的手术模拟正在迅速出现，并越来越多地被视为传统培训方法的有价值的补充或替代。模拟器可以生成具有逼真人体解剖结构和生理反应的虚拟患者，从而提供一个无风险的培训环境，并有可能在广泛的病理学范围内进行无限制的培训。除了这些好处，新的和复杂的外科手术可以在模拟器上安全地进行，然后再进行给病人;学生可以按照自己的时间表进行练习;培训课程可以存储，以后由医生审查。 虽然少数公司开始提供不同质量的手术模拟培训系统，但没有模拟器能够提供与现实手术足够高的相似度。仍然存在许多基本挑战和技术困难，例如触觉接口的灵活性，虚拟患者模型的准确性，碰撞建模，手术场景的实时和沉浸式可视化等。 在这项研究中，我们建议开发实现高度逼真的手术模拟所必需的原理，算法和工具，使医疗机构能够使用模拟器培训外科医生。由于潜在的研究课题的广泛范围，我们将我们的努力限制在一个子集的问题，包括：1。触觉反馈，2.组织建模; 3.验证标准。最后，将通过开发环甲膜切开术模拟器来整合和验证预期结果。*

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.***