Haptic rendering of soft-tissue for training surgical procedures at the larynx

Assistant physicians typically learn surgical techniques by observation and supervised practice on the patient or using biophantoms. Alternatively, surgical simulators with the possibility of new training possibilities can be used. A number of simulators is already commercially available and might in the future become as important for surgical training as flight simulators. Since so far no simulator is concerned with the training of tracheotomies, a soft-tissue model for simulating tracheotomy was developed. This soft-tissue model is integrated into our ENT surgical simulator for tracheotomy. To model the soft-tissues of the neck (skin and fat), a computed tomography (CT) scan was interactively segmented. For the interaction simulation of a scalpel with the soft-tissue, position based dynamics (PBD) was used, originally developed for the gaming industries. Initial results imply that the proposed approach is able to model soft tissues for virtual surgical training.