InitRech 2015/2016, sujet 7

Summary

The SOFA Framework is an informatics plateforms combining of advanced physical models, realistic human-computer interaction and growing computational power in order to help both medical students and experts to improve there skills and to achieve a higher degree of accuracy in surgical intervention.

Until now, residents in cardiology train on patients by separately learning each step of the procedure under the supervision of a senior cardiologist.

Beyond training, clinicians ask for innovative tools that can assist them in the pre-operative planning of an intervention.

Beside the surgery training and planning, another major need from clinicians is surgical guidance. Whilen the practician is performing the operation, a guidance system provides enriched visual feedback.

Applications

The first application based on the simulation framework SOFA is an interactive training system for interventional electrocardiology procedures. The simulation deals with virtual ablation of a cardiac arrhythmia which is caused by an abnormal electrical activity in the myocardium (heart walls). We consider a right-ventricular (RV) extrasystole, i.e. ventricular tachycardia caused by ectopic foci. An ectopic focus is an abnormal pacemaker area (outside of the sinoatrial node) that initiates abnormal self-generated beats.

In order to shorten the training period and to allow a virtual training on complex patient cases, we propose a training system based on the simulation of the cardiac electrophysiology,

The second application implemented in SOFA is a tool allowing for interactive cryosurgery planning. The cryosurgery or cryotherapy consists in destroying cancer cells by extreme cold delivered at the tip of a needle-like probe.

This is especially useful with the emergence of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) where the visual information is often strongly limited