Patient specific virtual and physical simulation platform for surgical robot movability evaluation in single-access robot-assisted minimally-invasive cardiothoracic surgery

Recently, minimally invasive cardiothoracic surgery (MICS) has grown in popularity thanks to its advantages over conventional surgery and advancements in surgical robotics. This paper presents a patient-specific virtual surgical simulator for the movability evaluation of single-port MICS robots. This simulator can be used for both the pre-operative planning to rehearse the case before the surgery, and to test the robot in the early stage of development before physical prototypes are built. A physical simulator is also proposed to test the robot prototype in a tangible environment. Synthetic replicas of the patient organs are able to replicate the mechanical behaviors of biological tissues, allowing the simulation of the physical interactions robot-anatomy. The preliminary tests of the virtual simulator showed good performance for both the visual and physics processes. After reviewing the physical simulator, a surgeon provided a positive evaluation of the organ replicas in terms of geometry and mechanical behaviors.