Design of the virtual reality based robotic catheter system for minimally invasive surgery training

Abstract

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a specialized surgical technique that permits vascular interventions through very small incisions. This minimizes the patients' trauma and permits a faster recovery compared to traditional surgery. However, the significant disadvantage of this surgery technique is its complexity; therefore, it requires extensive training before surgery. In this paper, for the VR system, we use the master side as the controller, and we use the open source code DCMTK to read the information of “.DCM” file and carry out the CT image segmentation for the Virtual Reality based Robotic Catheter System and we use Open Scene Graph (OSG) to realize the 3D image output and catheter control of the Virtual Reality System. We present virtual reality simulators for training with force feedback in minimally invasive surgery. This application allows generating realistic physical-based model of catheter and blood vessels, and enables surgeons to touch, feel and manipulate virtual catheter inside vascular model through the same surgical operation mode used in actual MIS. The experimental results show that the error rate is in an acceptable range and the simulators can be used for surgery training.