Rosen, J.M. and Laub, D.R. and Pieper, S.D. etc. Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, etc, Lebanon, New Hampshire joseph.rosenHitchcock.ORG
In "Virtual Reality and Medicine: From Training Systems to Performance Machines", Rosen, Laub and Pieper et al at Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Lebanon, New Hampshire reviewed a decade of work in applying virtual reality to medicine. In the past decade, VR was mainly used for surgical planning, training and surgery simulation. They mentioned surgery on face, abdomen, leg and liver, however, they did not mention work done on neuro-surgical. They reviewed work done on computer aided surgery planning and computer surgery simulation. The emphasis of the reviewed work on computer aided planning is on the Finite-Element mesh and polyhedral methods to reconstruct (model) human body parts.
In analogy to the success of flight simulator, the authors believe the potential success of surgical simulation. Surgical simulators should consists three basic components: computer, interface and physical model. Physical model contains the patient model, operation room and surgical instruments. The interface use either a force-feedback mouse or glove to allow the operator to manipulate the surgical instruments in 3-D and give the user force-feedback, let the user use a tool to touch and feel the tissue of the organ.
For surgical planning, training and surgical simulation, one thing is common, we need a way to represent the human body organs, either by physical model or by raw volume data sets. In addition to representation of human organs, we need an interface which can let the real world user interactively navigate inside the organ. Hence, in my opinion, it is better to use a force-feedback tool, like Pantograph designed by Prof. V. Hayward, as the haptic interface. This pen like interface is quite similar to a surgical tool used by the surgeon during minimum invasive surgery. In addition to this, this allows the operator to access the key board and access to any point shown on the screen. The present shortcoming of this pen like haptic device is only 2-D, can not measure its orientation.
Virtual reality and Medicine; Literature Review in application of Virtual reality in Medicine;
Dinsmore et al. designed a Virtual Realitly system for Palpation of Subsurface Liver Tumors. Yagel et al at State University of Ohio designed another Multisensory Platform for Endoscopic Sinus Surgery (ESS). These are models of integration graphic display with haptic force feedback. What is gain of this intergration of several modality over simple graphics display are very obvious there.