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Collaborative Gallbladder Training

This page reports on work carried out from 2001-2004.

We developed a concept demonstrator that showed how collaborative haptic virtual environments could be used to teach the anatomy and surgical approach for laparoscopic cholecystectomy (removal of the gallbladder through a keyhole incision). The system demonstrated how an instructor could link to a trainee, who could be in another room or even another country, and guide them through the steps necessary to conduct the procedure. As well as including interactive models of representative patient anatomy, the system also featured new approaches to remote teaching, including annotation of the model in 3D, joint haptic manipulation of deformable objects, haptic hand-on-hand guiding, surgical instrument vapour trails and shared access to pre-recorded video segments and other media such as x-rays. The system was showcased in a live demonstration at the SimTecT conference in 2004, linking conference attendees in Canberra, Australia, with surgical trainers at Stanford University School of Medicine, USA.