Simulation of thermal damage to bone tissue during bone drilling

Drilling of bone, which is an essential part in temporal bone surgeries, is applied for making a tiny surgical entrance(incision) to the target. Because the temporal bone has a remarkable complex anatomy structures responsible for hearing and balance, VR (virtual reality)-based simulator is desirable for the trainee to interactively localize and operate on the target in a virtual space. In the surgical process, vast heat is generated while the drill bit cuts the bone tissue. For the human body, the tolerance of the bone tissue to the temperature is limited and a persistently high temperature may possibly result in thermal necrosis. In this paper, we have proposed a framework to evaluate the thermal damage to bone tissue during the bone drilling process. Heat generation and conduction were both modelled physically in our framework. The profile of temperature distribution in the bone tissue was used to determine the region of thermal necrosis which is treated as one of the metrics to assess the quality of the virtual surgical case.