Grant: University Faculty Award

Cardiovascular disease is the most frequent cause of illness-related death in both Canada and in North America as a whole. Conventional surgeries are usually open procedures that are extremely invasive. Recent progress with minimally invasive beating-heart surgery offers an exciting and promising option to patients with cardiovascular disease. This procedure avoids operation of a sternotomy and the use of a heart-lung machine. As a result, it provides the patients with substantial benefits such as reduced trauma, shorter recovery time and fewer complications. It also represents significant long-term fiscal savings for the Canadian healthcare system. However, it creates significant difficulties for the surgeon, such as poor hand-eye coordination, restricted maneuverability, and lack of haptic (force/tactile) feedback. These challenges raise critical issues in surgical safety and precision. In the future, many of these issues can be addressed through the use of haptic virtual fixtures, which are computer-generated signals applied to the surgeon through force/tactile feedback. As in the case of real fixtures, such as a ruler guiding a pencil, virtual fixtures still permit the surgeon to have ultimate control. At the same time, it extends their capability, enhances the speed of surgery, and potentially reduces the surgeon's mental stress by providing a local reference and restricting the motion of the surgical tool. Our research aims to apply virtual fixtures more directly to the operation room (OR) and investigate surgeon-friendly and patient-specific virtual fixtures. The long-term goals of this research include: 1) building intelligent surgical planning systems 2) developing procedures with ultimate precision and safety and 3) performing virtual stabilized beating-heart surgery. We believe that the successful completion of this project will result in powerful tools that will significantly improve the level of safety and precision in minimally invasive surgery and therapy. This work also represents a valuable contribution to the haptics-augmented patient-specific virtual reality surgery environment.