3-D rendering provide a concise way of depicting an entire data set, instead of flipping through lots and lots of two dimensional images.
Virtual surgical training is one of the most promising areas in medicine where 3-D computer graphics and virtual reality techniques are emerging. While currently available VR surgery systems usually require expensive hardware and software, we developed a desktop VR orthopedic surgery training system that can run on commonly available personal computer so that it is able to work even at the surgeon’s home PCs.
During the common orthopedic surgery training, the students are asked to fix up fractures on plastic bones using surgical tools and implants. The typical fractured plastic bone is shown in Figure 1. The students have to reduce the fracture and internally fix it using implants that include hundreds of different plates, screws, nails, and wires. See Figure 2, for example, where the fractured femur is fixed with the nail inserted in its canal. For the insertion of implants, different surgical instruments are used which allow the surgeons to drill the holes, to measure for a length, to insert the implants, etc. The next step will be surgical operations on cadavers, and only after that the student will be allowed to approach the real patient. The idea to use a computer for the orthopedic surgery training came from the Department of Orthopedics at Singapore General Hospital who approached the School of Applied Science at the Nanyang Technological University where Olga and me were employed at the moment. The surgeons were interested, first, in saving the cost of the bones since the good quality synthetic bones are expensive, and, second, in the ability to work with the certain bones that might be not available in the market. Besides that, the surgeons anticipated an attractive possibility of training the students on the virtual models of real fractures obtained from the CT or MRI data. Certainly, this virtual training will not substitute completely the compulsory training on synthetic bones and on cadavers but may allow the students to perform the initial routine work entirely in the virtual environment thus saving the cost and the time of the common training. To make this virtual training easily accessible, we decided to develop the core system capable of running on common personal computers available in every medical clinic and at homes. We’ve come up with the project aiming to develop an inexpensive alternative to the common orthopedic surgery training that allows the surgeons the following:
- To keep in the computer every single bone with different sizes and specific features that might be difficult and expensive using the synthetic models.
- To create models of the fractured bones from real patients where the data comes from CT and MRI images.
- To go even further and to perform surgical operation planning before the actual operation is undertaken.
Virtual Surgery is a one stop shop for all your technical needs. We can teach you how to use your technology more productively, solve problems you are having and advise you on what products to buy.
Virtual Surgery was set-up to help a growing number of people deal with a huge variety of technical issues they may face.
Services which we provide for both personal and corporate include:
- Consulting / Advice
- Tutoring / Teaching
- Trouble shooting
- Installations
- Tune-ups
- Video Editing
- Web Design
- Coding
