Searching for a Specific Virtual Environment for an Angioplasty Training Simulator

Many minimally invasive procedures need to be learned by repetition whilst avoiding risk for real patients. Virtual reality technology brings numerous advantages to the medical community making it possible to build surgical training simulators which offer hospitals a means of improving training and reducing the costs of education. It is very important to carry out the same surgical procedure on a variety of different case studies. This paper presents a prototype of a coronary stent implant simulator and a 3-tier architecture, able to look for a virtual environment with specific features in terms of pathology or anatomy. The simulator permits real-time interactions with a deformable artery and is provided with a specific haptic device. The virtual environment is built from real patients’ images and by means of a Web Portal it is possible, using data from many medical centres, to search for virtual environments which differ in terms of the pathology, the anatomical structure and the patient’s age, so that they correspond to several virtual patients, each of them exhibiting a particular difficulty. The search for the desired virtual environment is based on the descriptive information (metadata) stored with the virtual environments on databases present in the medical centres. After downloading and integration of the desired virtual environment in the training centre it is possible to carry out training on the cathetering procedure.