A training system for virtual surgical incisions with haptic playback

The haptic playback system is important to the training of sensorimotor skills. With the intent for training medical students in surgery, a real-time incision training system with haptic playback is developed in this paper. This system has three modes. Mode I sets the standard cutting trajectory of the incision operation carried out by an expert. Mode II allows students to track the trajectory by haptic guidance to feel the expert's motion. Mode III lets students experience the force feeling of the expert by following the trajectory via the visual cue. To accomplish these tasks, an adjustment proportional-derivative (PD) controller and a cutting model with real-time haptic feedback are devised. The cutting model adopts the mesh adaption method for real-time simulations of progressive cutting operations. These devised methods have been configured with a haptic device PHANToM Desktop to validate the capability of the proposed training system.