Quan Shi,∗ Peter Xiaoping Liu,∗∗,∗∗∗∗ and Wenguo Hou∗∗∗
Haptics, robotic surgery, surgery simulation, virtual reality
The lack of effective methods and tools for surgical training has been a long-standing problem in medical education as current approaches exhibit various limitations and drawbacks. Because of their many unique advantages, haptics and virtual-reality-based surgical simulators are increasingly regarded as a promising solution to the current predicament, representing possibly next-generation paradigm for surgical training. Current surgical simulators, however, are still at their infancy and there exist numerous technical challenges and difficulties. In particular, no simulator is able to provide a sufficiently high degree of visual and haptic resemblance to real-life surgery. Mainly using neurosurgery as an example, this paper gives a brief overview of the current state-of-arts of surgical simulation, discusses some major problems and issues, and provides some perspectives on potential future research directions, particularly on modelling of tissue properties and deformation.
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