Simulation of the virtual reality based robotic catheter system

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a specialized surgical technique that permits vascular interventions through very small incisions and minimizes the patient´s trauma and permits a faster recovery compared to traditional surgery. Telemedicine is one area where remotely controlled robots can have a major impact by providing urgent care at remote sites. However, the significant disadvantage of this surgery technique is complexity and it requires extensive training before surgery. The unavailability of force and tactile feedback the operator must determine the required action by visually examining the remote site and therefore limiting the tasks. In this paper, we present virtual reality simulators for training with force feedback in minimally invasive surgery which 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. In this paper, the design of the MIS VR system and initial experimental results are presented and the experimental results show that the error rate is in an acceptable range and the simulators can be used for surgery training.