ERC funds virtual surgery project
A European Research Council-funded project is developing virtual experiments to help new surgeons hone their skills before they start working on live patients.
ERC fellow Stéphane Bordas, professor of computational mechanics at the University of Luxembourg, and collaborators at Cardiff University in the UK, were awarded a €1.3m Starting Grant from the ERC in 2012 for the initiative.
Bordas’ long term aim is to develop real-time simulators, much like flight simulators, which will help train surgeons, assist them during operations and contribute to enhancing surgical planning. By constructing virtual ‘in silico’ replicas of the patients, such tools have the potential to reduce errors and post-operative complications and could eventually lead to robot-assisted and robot-led surgery.
The project is entitled ‘RealTcut’ (reality cut) and was born from the realisation of similarities between the structure of soft human tissue and that of advanced engineering materials such as those developed for the aerospace industry.
Bordas explained: “The ultimate goal is to be able to simulate surgical cutting for the first time in quasi real time, thereby allowing trainee surgeons to hone their skills in a virtual environment before beginning work with live patients.”
The main challenge of the research is to enable both realistic and real-time simulation of phenomena, such as cutting in soft tissue, which are still poorly understood. Bordas is hopeful that this research project, which runs until 2017, and has already led to the first real-time error controlled simulator of cutting in soft tissue, will bring substantial fundamental advances as well as medical and industrial benefits.
