Construction of Training Environment for Surgical Exclusion with a Basic Study of Multi-finger Haptic Interaction

Virtual reality based surgical simulator allows a repetitive training without spoiling patients. Exclusion is an important surgical manipulation of pushing aside organ to make a hidden tissue visible. The authors propose an organ exclusion training simulator with multi-finger haptic interaction and stress visualization. The system equips FEM-based soft tissue deformation and exoskeletal haptic device CyberForce. Real-time simulation was achieved with a prototype system. Results of training trial suggested effectiveness of stress visualization especially in early training days. Subjective evaluation by surgeons cleared its potential. Results of a basic study showed decrease of required refresh rate in multi-finger interaction compared with single finger interaction. It suggested the system can keep realism even if calculation time is increased by multi-finger interaction