title: Virtual model of the human brain for neurosurgical simulation.
abstract: The aim of this work is to develop a realistic virtual model of the human brain that could be used in a neurosurgical simulation for both educational and preoperative planning purposes. The goal of such a system would be to enhance the practice of surgery students, avoiding the use of animals, cadavers and plastic phantoms. A surgeon, before carrying out the real procedure, will, with this system, be able to rehearse by using a surgical simulator based on detailed virtual reality models of the human brain, reconstructed with real patient's medical images. In order to obtain a realistic and useful simulation we focused our research on the physical modelling of the brain as a deformable body and on the interactions with surgical instruments. The developed prototype is based on the mass-spring-damper model and, in order to obtain deformations similar to the real ones, a three tiered structure has been built. In this way, we have obtained local and realistic deformations using an ad-hoc point distribution in the volume where the contact between the brain surface and a surgical instrument takes place.
authors.affiliation: Department of Innovation Engineering, Salento University, Lecce, Italy. lucio.depaolis@unile.it
authors.forename: Lucio T
authors.initials: LT
authors.lastname: De Paolis
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: De Mauro
authors.forename: Joerg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Raczkowsky
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Aloisio
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000601:surgery*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D019635:Neurosurgical Procedures; D014584:User-Computer Interface