Abstract
It is important to assist doctors operating the intravascular surgical tools such as a catheter that is designed for minimum invasive surgery inside complex and narrow brain blood vessels. To solve this problem, we propose a multimedia tele-medicine for diagnosis, training, and assistance in surgery. We built a prototype of a virtual simulator system for the intravascular neurosurgery that consists of a 3D-Computer Graphics simulator and a joystick. The joystick is used for the controller and force display of catheter head direction. A visual assistance method is proposed to assist the operator. Finally, we present results of teleoperation experiments between Nagoya and Tokyo, about 350 km away each other, using high speed optical fiber network with ATM, and evaluate effectiveness of the proposed teleoperation system and the visual assistance method.
