Patient Specific Virtual and Physical Simulation Platform for Surgical Robot Movability Evaluation in Single-Access Robot-Assisted Minimally-Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery
Abstract
Recently, minimally invasive cardiothoracic surgery (MICS) has grown in popularity thanks to its advantages over conventional surgery and advancements in surgical robotics.
This paper presents a patient-specific virtual surgical simulator for the movability evaluation of single-port MICS robots. This simulator can be used for both the pre-operative planning to rehearse the case before the surgery, and to test the robot in the early stage of development before physical prototypes are built.
A physical simulator is also proposed to test the robot prototype in a tangible environment. Synthetic replicas of the patient organs are able to replicate the mechanical behaviors of biological tissues, allowing the simulation of the physical interactions robot-anatomy.
The preliminary tests of the virtual simulator showed good performance for both the visual and physics processes.
After reviewing the physical simulator, a surgeon provided a positive evaluation of the organ replicas in terms of geometry and mechanical behaviors.
Keywords
Virtual reality Unity game engine Computer-assisted surgery Minimally-invasive surgery Cardiothoracic surgery Robotic surgery Surgical simulationNotes
Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has been supported by the scientific project ValveTech (“Realizzazione di una Valvola Aortica Polimerica di Nuova Concezione ed Impiantabile Tramite Piattaforma Robotica con Tecniche di Chirurgia Mininvasiva” 2016–2018) funded by the Tuscany Region (Italy) through the call FAS SALUTE 2014.
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