Simulating Haptic Feedback of Abdomen Organs on Laparoscopic Surgery Tools

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) such as laparoscopic procedures are widely used for many types of abdomen surgeries because of its numerous advantages over open surgeries. They require very high levels of skills of surgeons acquired through experience. The best and the safest way of getting hands on experience is the computer simulation or virtual reality (VR). The VR surgical simulators have a great potential to revolutionize the training paradigm of surgical interns. The haptic feedback plays as equally as visual feedback to provide realistic environment to trainees. In this paper, we present a method incorporate hapitics on VR simulator. A software procedure is developed using the Libraries of Open Haptic Toolkit along with the Open GL graphic libraries to implement three basic haptic ranges: soft, mild(firm) and hard into organ models. The feedback of the expert surgeons in the field was obtained to model the organs rather than measuring mechanical properties of soft tissues due to practical limitations. A commercially available six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) position sensing and three DoF force feedback haptic device is used to implement the interface.