Surgical rehearsal plays a significant role for surgical procedures because surgery is generally dependent on the patient's anatomy. A surgical rehearsal system, which is a kind of computer simulator, enables to rehearse surgical procedures. Surgical rehearsal description language (SRDL) is a core part of a surgical rehearsal system. Existing techniques have been focused on achieving realistic simulation in surgical procedures; however, it is more critical to enable the surgeons to grasp the vascular anatomic topology intuitively. We propose a graphbased vessel representation as an abstract and cognitive vessel descriptor. Moreover, we demonstrated the scheme by developing an OpenGL-based surgical description language viewer for gastrectomy.
Laparoscopic surgery has been widely performed for early gastric cancer. However, laparoscopic surgery has some disadvantages from the limited view of the operative field. Moreover, the topological patterns of vessels in the stomach are complex and varies between patients. Therefore, it is difficult to ligate the gastric arteries and veins in laparoscopic gastrectomy. In this study, we proposed a vessel navigator to guide an optimal path to the target vessels. The proposed method used a topological vessel map obtained from the abdomen computed tomography angiography images. In addition, it was designed to guide the optimal route to the target vessels from the present point. For this purpose, we defined a penalty function to measure how difficult a suggested pathway is compared with the other one. To assess the feasibility of the proposed vessel navigator, we applied to several steps of the laparoscopic gastrectomy.
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