InitRech 2015/2016, sujet 7

Summary

Surgeons and interventional radiologists are supposed to practice during an important amount of time to be considered as experts in their respective domains. Until now, residents in cardiology train on patients by separately learning each step of the procedure under the supervision of a senior cardiologist. But this method is slow and sometimes posing ethical issues.

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.

This tools can:

• train with virtual 3D simulators with realistic and configurable environment where any surgical scenario can be reproduced and repeated without any restriction and ethical issues.

• assist the medical field in the pre-operative planning of an intervention.

• give a surgical guidance. Whilen the practician is performing the operation, a guidance system provides enriched visual feedback.

In this paper, you will see all the advantages gave by this plateform and the contribution for the medical field.

Main contribution

Obviously, the main contribution of this tool is for the medical fields.

The aim of this plateform is to help and improve surgeon-student and expert (mainly in the cardiology field) combining all the computer's tools they need on the same plateform.

This plateform seems to be a efficient solution, allowing reductions in time, effort and cost, needed for development and maintenance of complexe simulations in health-care.

Applications

The first application based on the simulation framework SOFA is an interactive training system for interventional electrocardiology procedures.

The simulation permit to train the surgery on a virtual 3D simulator and to improve the skills of the surgeron. Notice, this is not only surgeron's student but also expert. This as for goal, to shorten the training period and to allow a virtual training on complex patient cases.

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 where the visual information is often strongly limited.