Real‐time suturing simulation for virtual reality medical training

Abstract

Abstract At present, virtual reality (VR) ‐based medical simulators provide an efficient and cost‐effective alternative without exposing risk to the traditional training approaches. As an essential and indispensable task in fundamental surgical skills training, the research of suturing simulation still remains insufficient in the field of virtual surgery. In this paper, we present a real‐time suturing simulation framework which can handle the complex interactions between surgical instruments and soft tissue. The simulation consists of two stages: external interaction and internal coupling. External interaction involves the interplay between needle/suture and the soft tissue, which are both deformed by position‐based dynamics (PBD) with different constraints. At the internal coupling stage, once the force exceeds a threshold, the needle tip will puncture and penetrate into the soft tissue and generate a path. To guarantee the needle/suture accurately following the path inside the soft tissue, we propose a novel coupling method by matching and generating the constraints among needle, suture, and penetration path. We have applied this suturing simulation into a VR laparoscopic surgery simulator with haptic force. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve real‐time performance with a high degree of visual realism and haptic fidelity.