Advanced Ureteroscopy Simulation Workstation for Medical

"The challenges associated with surgery are diverse and often subtle. In order for a surgeon to become proficient, a thorough understanding of a wide range of surgical techniques is required. This includes the ability to assess a given situation and takethe appropriate actions. These techniques require fine perceptual motor skills and attention to detail. The difficulty of open surgery notwithstanding, MIS introduces additional challenges. With MIS, the surgeon's view is limited to a 2-D representationof what the camera sees. Rather than a full view of the surgical field, only a relatively small area can be viewed at any given time. Also, the perspective-viewing angle can only be slightly altered, making depth perception very challenging. Theselimitations require surgeons to develop highly tuned spatial cognition skills in order to mentally reconstruct the 3-D environment.Diamond Visionics will provide useful solutions to the challenges stated above based on our extensive background in medical simulation and visualization. In Phase I, Diamond Visionics will investigate the feasibility of developing a proof-of-conceptPC-based MIS simulation system for endoscopic surgical simulation. This system will greatly improve surgeon effectiveness by providing realistic visualization, haptics, and validated courseware. Federal and non-federal markets for the results of this research include a wide spectrum of medical facilities and inst