Development of Cholecystectomy Simulation for Laparoscopic Surgery Training

Received 7 February 2012; received in revised form 30 July 2012; accepted 31 July 2012ABSTRACT Laparoscopic surgery is a surgical procedure which uses long laparoscopic instruments throughtiny holes in abdomen while watching images from a laparoscopic camera through umbilicus.Laparoscopic surgeries have many advantages rather than open surgeries, however it is hard tolearn the surgical skills for laparoscopic surgery. Recently, some virtual simulation systems forlaparoscopic surgery are developed to train novice surgeons or resident surgeons. In this study,we introduce the techniques that we developed for laparoscopic surgical training simulator forcholecystectomy (gallbladder removal), which is one of the most frequently performed by lap-aroscopic surgery. The techniques for cholecystectomy simulation include modeling of humanorgans (liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, etc.), real-time deformable body calculation, realistic 3Dvisualization of surgical scene, high-fidelity haptic rendering and haptic device technology, andso on. We propose each simulation technique for the laparoscopic cholecystectomy proceduressuch as indentifying cystic duct and cystic artery to clamp and cut, dissecting connective tis-sues between the gallbladder and liver. In this paper, we describe the techniques and discussabout the results of the proposed cholecystectomy simulation for laparoscopic surgical training.Key words:Cholecystectomy, Deformable body modeling, Gallbladder removal, Laparoscopicsurgery, Training simulation