Current Research Projects-Training for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Virtually Assisted Surgery Trainer (VAST)

The increasing practice of minimally invasive surgery and laparoscopic procedures has created a demand for surgical simulation systems for use in education and training. This demand has been fueled by the key role that such systems could play in surgical training and by the various limitations of similar existing systems that have attempted to fill this need.

The more conventional training methods that use animals, cadavers and real patients raise ethical and technical issues. Surgical simulators may address these issues by providing a safe and viable alternative. Virtual patient models can incorporate realistic human anatomy, while both normal and pathological physiology can be simulated. Existing simulation systems render very poor realism, offer limited training scenarios, do not reflect the variations of human anatomy and do not provide a very structured training approach.

This proposal seeks funding to develop phase one of a system that is capable of simulating surgical procedures in the context of laparoscopic cholecystectomy, the most common minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure performed today.