For the left ventricular plastic surgery, cardiac muscle palpation is the only method of determining the regions that should be removed. Because the left ventricle would be operated after the chest incision with using a heart-lung machine, the opportunity to palpate the diseased cardiac muscle is limited in the operative theater. The training system for cardiac muscle palpation we have developed is composed of a beating virtual heart and a 5-DOF haptic device, which is effective to overcome the present condition that the surgical training opportunities are poor. Experimental results of this study show that the justification of the virtual heart modeling comparing with a living dog heart and the real-time correlation between the virtual heart and the haptic device.The validation with a skillful surgeon is needed to make our system more practical.

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Surgical simulator systems have been developed for surgical training and planning. On the other hand, surgical navigation systems arise to play an important role in laparoscopic surgery. In these systems the deformation of organ is required to be simulated realistically. Finite element method is a useful tool for this purpose due to its clear physical background. In this work the simulation of liver deformation in liver surgery is carried out by introducing nonlinear finite element method. The material constants in the constitutive relation are identified by an experimental measurement, and then realistic deformations of liver are obtained by taking the geometrical and material nonlinearities into account.

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