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.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/giuseppe-turini/16/
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60927-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60928-7
Pgs. 211-220