Overview of Surgical Simulation

Motivated by the current demand of clinical governance, surgical simulation is now a well-established modality for basic skills training and assessment. The practical deployment of the technique is a multi-disciplinary venture encompassing areas in engineering, medicine and psychology. This paper provides an overview of the key topics involved in surgical simulation and associated technical challenges. The paper discusses the clinical motivation for surgical simulation, the use of virtual environments for surgical training, model acquisition and simplification, deformable models, collision detection, tissue property measurement, haptic rendering and image synthesis. Additional topics include surgical skill training and assessment metrics as well as challenges facing the incorporation of surgical simulation into medical education curricula.