Making Surgical Simulations a Reality: Technical and Practical Issues for Applications in Medicine

Surgical simulators have been developed especially in the past few years for enhancing the training of physicians, reducing the number of animals and cadavers, flexibility of training scenarios and for preoperative planning. Despite their potential benefits, and the fact that they have precedence in flight simulators, there are very few simulators in current use. This is primarily due to the lack of understanding of fundamentally what is required for them to be useful, and the fact that the problem is interdisciplinary. This interdisciplinary nature has lead to difficulties in forming a productive team. In this paper, we discuss the technical and practical issues in developing useful surgical simulators. Two case studies representative of the strengths of weaknesses of the technology is presented, including simulation of procedures in the Cryotherapy of the prostate and interventional radiology.