InitRech 2015/2016, sujet 7

Summary

Surgeons and interventional radiologists are supposed to practice during an important amount of time to be considered as experts in their respective domains. Until now, residents in cardiology train on patients by separately learning each step of the procedure under the supervision of a senior cardiologist. But this method is slow and sometimes posing ethical issues.

The SOFA Framework is an informatics plateforms combining of advanced physical models, realistic human-computer interaction and growing computational power in order to help both medical students and experts to improve there skills and to achieve a higher degree of accuracy in surgical intervention.

The aim of this plateform is to help and improve surgeon-student and expert (mainly in the cardiology field) combining all the computer's tools they need on the same plateform.

This tools can:

• train with virtual 3D simulators with realistic and configurable environment where any surgical scenario can be reproduced and repeated without any restriction and ethical issues.

• assist the medical field in the pre-operative planning of an intervention.

• give a surgical guidance. Whilen the practician is performing the operation, a guidance system provides enriched visual feedback.

In this paper, you will see all the advantages gave by this plateform and the contribution for the medical field.

Applications

The first application based on the simulation framework SOFA is an interactive training system for interventional electrocardiology procedures. The simulation deals with virtual ablation of a cardiac arrhythmia which is caused by an abnormal electrical activity in the myocardium (heart walls). We consider a right-ventricular (RV) extrasystole, i.e. ventricular tachycardia caused by ectopic foci. An ectopic focus is an abnormal pacemaker area (outside of the sinoatrial node) that initiates abnormal self-generated beats.

In order to shorten the training period and to allow a virtual training on complex patient cases, we propose a training system based on the simulation of the cardiac electrophysiology,

The second application implemented in SOFA is a tool allowing for interactive cryosurgery planning. The cryosurgery or cryotherapy consists in destroying cancer cells by extreme cold delivered at the tip of a needle-like probe.

This is especially useful with the emergence of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) where the visual information is often strongly limited