Patient-specific pipeline to create virtual endoscopic third ventriculostomy scenarios

Area of Science:

• Neurosurgery
• Medical Simulation
• Virtual Reality

Background:

• Virtual reality (VR) surgical simulations are increasingly used for neurosurgical training.
• While offering advantages like safety and cost-effectiveness, current simulations lack anatomical variability.
• This limits their clinical applicability for diverse patient anatomy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and implement a pipeline for creating patient-specific surgical scenarios.
• To enhance simulator-based training for the endoscopic third ventriculostomy procedure.
• To address the deficit in representing clinical anatomical variations in VR simulations.

Main Methods:

• Development of a computational pipeline.
• Integration of patient-specific imaging data.
• Creation of realistic, haptics-enabled virtual environments.

Main Results:

• A functional pipeline for generating patient-specific VR surgical scenarios was successfully implemented.
• The pipeline enables the creation of diverse anatomical variations for training.
• The system is tailored for endoscopic third ventriculostomy simulation.

Conclusions:

• Patient-specific VR simulations can significantly improve neurosurgical training.
• This approach enhances the realism and clinical relevance of surgical simulators.
• The developed pipeline offers a novel solution for training complex neurosurgical procedures like ETV.