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HT - DARPA Abdominal Trauma simulator

At HT Medical, Inc. I have been the principal investigator and project lead for the DARPA funded Abdominal Trauma Surgery Simulator project. The objective was to develop a simulation system demonstrating multi-media and advanced simulation technology for training of abdominal surgery.

Highlights from the simulator:

• Deformable objects using mass-spring/particle models. These models can be cut arbitrarily and remain deformable.
• Bleeding using diffusion algorithm working on polygonal models.
• Force-feedback using the Phantom from SenSable Devices.
• 'Wet'-look using multi-texture rendering.
• Highly detailed computer graphics models developed from the Visible Human using Mvox and A|W PowerAnimator.
• Programmed in C++ and Java using SGI Performer 2.1
• Communication using PVM and UDP sockets.
• Implemented on SGI Onyx-2 (4proc/infinite-reality) and SGI IMPACT.

Images

Abdominal anatomy - data from Visible Productions.	General setup - screen shot from video.	GUI interface.
Pushing on the stomach.	Making the incision in the stomach.	Ending the incision in the stomach.
Stomach has been opened.	After omentum and small intestants have been moved.	After colon has been moved.
Pushing on the renal fascia.	Cutting the renal fascia.	Pulling the kidney out.
Viewing the damaged kidney.
Copyright HT Medical Systems Inc

• Virtual Medical Worlds: Abdominal Trauma Simulator probes frontiers of realistic modelling (July 6, 1998)
• M. Bro-Nielsen, D. Helfrick, B. Glass, X. Zeng, and H. Connacher, VR simulation of abdominal trauma surgery, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 6 (MMVR-6), San Diego, California, 1998
• M. Bro-Nielsen and G. Merril, HT Abdominal Trauma Simulator, Presentation at MMVR-5, 1997
• M. Bro-Nielsen: Fast finite elements for surgery simulation, Proc. Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 5 (MMVR-5'97), 1997