Distributed virtual environment for intravascular tele-surgery using multimedia telecommunication

The number of specialized medical doctors is decreasing. It is important to assist doctors in their operation of surgical tools. To solve this problem, we propose a distributed VR system using multimedia telecommunication for training, diagnosis, and assistance in surgery. To realize this system, it is important to exchange high quality moving pictures. We use high speed optical fiber network with ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). ATM has excellent features such as bandwidth allocation which is suitable for multimedia communication on computer networks. Based on this new information infrastructure we built a prototype telesurgery system for intravascular neurosurgery. We made a virtual simulator for the operation of a catheter, that is designed for minimum invasive surgery inside complex and narrow brain blood vessels. A force display and visual assistance method are proposed to assist the doctor. We undertook teleoperation experiments between Nagoya and Tokyo, about 350 km away each other, using high speed optical fiber network, and evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed system.