Ioanna's digital perch

My PhD work involves the development of virtual reality surgical simulators with force feedback. The main idea is that we need a way of identifying and prioritising the fidelity requirements of surgical simulators such that they can be useful training tools. The reason for this is that we can expend large amounts of unnecessary effort in trying to make a simulator realistic, when only few aspects of reality are actually important to the training objectives of the simulator.

We study how expert and novice surgeons perform and use this information to identify which factors and cues need to be simulated in high fidelity. This allows us to focus our efforts in developing those aspects while other less important aspects can be simulated in lower fidelity or not at all.

At the present time, I and my colleagues at MUVES (Melbourne University Virtual Environments for Simulation) are working on a prototype simulator for maxillofacial surgery based on data collected from experiments with novice and expert dentists.

The simulator is developed for a PHANTOM Premium 1.5 High Force haptic device using the H3D haptics API with custom C++ modules and Python extensions. The video below demonstrates the visual aspects of this prototype.