Abstract
For left ventricular plastic surgery, cardiac muscular elasticity around the ischemic regions are needed to determine the region where should be removed. A cardiac surgeon palpates the patient's cardiac muscle under running a heart-lung machine to diagnosis its elasticity and contractile stiffness, because the latest medical imaging techniques cannot give these information to the surgeons. Since the surgical efficiency and the treatment results depend on the intraoperative cardiac muscle palpation skill, the cardiac surgeons desire the training opportunity before and after the surgery. The training system we have developed is composed of a beating virtual heart and a haptic device, where the system user is able to touch the virtual heart and feel the cardiac elasticity. In this paper, we propose the virtual heart model which interacts with the haptic device manipulation in real time, and the validation results by the skillful cardiac surgeons are presented.
