2001 Volume 21 Issue 5 Pages 315-323
Recent spread of minimally invasive surgeries with robotics forces surgeons to acquire high procedural skills and more experience. Since cardiovascular surgeons relatively deal with difficult surgeries, a support system is desired for education and preoperative design. To satisfy these requirements, this study developed the ActiveHeart system that presents virtual reality based simulation for cardiac surgeries. The system has a geometrical and physical simulation framework for sequential dataset of a beating heart, and provides real time deformation and incision on cardiac muscle and aorta. A result of simulation presents visual and haptic feedback to the surgeons interactively. Our system also simulates realistic surgical environments that produce grasping, manipulating, volumetric cutting and physical constraint between surgical instruments and soft tissues. This paper describes efficiency of our system by illustrating some clinical use such as diagnosis with real time visualization, procedural training, and preoperative planning.
