A real time haptic simulator of spine surgeries

Spine surgeries are high risk operations which require the surgeons to have ample experiences. For young surgeons, effective and extensive training is critical. This paper presents a real time haptic spine surgical simulator that will be used to train residents, fellows and spine surgeons in a hospital training program. It provides a realistic environment for the trainees to practice spine surgeries and has the advantages of being interactive, low-cost, representative, and repeatable over conventional training approaches. Haptic Phantom offers the users force feedback, differentiating our system from other screen-based training systems. Computational efficiency was achieved by developing advanced graphical rendering methods. The volumetric data was classified into surface voxel cloud and inner voxel cloud by the adjacency graph which stored the relationship among voxels. To speed up the collision detection and real time rendering between the virtual surgical tools and the lumbar model, Octree-based algorithms and GPU technique were applied. To enhance the physical realism, three dimensional lumbar vertebrae models were reconstructed from CT images and associated with non-homogeneous bone density such that the rendered model best represents the spine anatomy and mechanics. We demonstrate system performance by conducting pedicle screw insertion.