Development of haptic-enabled virtual reality simulator for video-assisted thoracoscopic right upper lobectomy

Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS), referred to as the commonest minimum invasive excision for located T1 or T2 lung carcinomas, requires a steep learning curve for the novice residents to acquire highly deliberate skills to achieve surgical competence. The aim of this study is to propose a virtual reality-based (VR) surgical educative simulator with realistic performance in both visual and haptic sensation for the VAST procedures. To provide an immersive and perceptual user interface, we combined the customized haptic-enabled thoracoscopic instruments with HTC VIVE helmet set in our simulation system. In particular, position based deformation (PBD) method on the GPU and a novel haptic rendering algorithm of surgical grasps and stapling operations are also been implemented for the surgical scene, respectively for the soft tissue deformation and intraoperative force manipulation simulation. Experiments by thoracic surgery professors and novices' evaluation results on our framework demonstrated a high performance and distinguished accurately. These study findings suggested a new cognitive model for the VATS surgical education integrate with haptic and VR implementation.