ISBN 9783843902908

978-3-8439-0290-8, Reihe Informatik

Sebastian Ullrich
Bimanual Interaction for Medical Virtual Environments: Palpation and Needle Intervention

187 Seiten, Dissertation Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (2011), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

While medicine and surgery evolved significantly in the last century and past decade, the teaching methods have not changed in the same manner. The apprenticeship model “See one, do one, teach one'' is still common practice and bears risks in patient safety. Traditional training methods are often constrained and limited, e.g., puppets and artificial material deteriorate from repeated usage, training on corpses or animals is expensive, tissue behavior differs and the usage is ethically questionable. Most of these issues can be addressed by virtual reality-based training simulators.

In this thesis we focus on bimanual interaction for medical simulation. More specifically, novel approaches for simultaneous palpation and needle insertion are researched. To apply and validate these techniques on a specific medical procedure, we choose the femoral block technique from regional anesthesia.

The major contributions of this thesis are a real-time capable software architecture that allows for haptic bimanual interaction in a finite element-based medical simulation environment, novel methods for palpation with tissue dragging, simulated anatomical landmarks and haptic pulse rendering, and methods for haptic needle insertion with multiple tissue layers. Simulator prototypes are described that utilize the aforementioned algorithms and combine these for medical training scenarios with plausible anatomical datasets, produced with the content creation tools. Finally, the algorithms are in part assessed with time measurements for performance, force logging for analysis of simulation results and the prototypes are validated with medical experts in user studies.