Scooping simulation framework for artificial cervical disc replacement surgery

In the last two decades virtual reality (VR) simulations have had revolutionary effects on many fields such as medicine, architecture, science, financial, and military applications. On the contrary, in medicine, the applications of VR are not as extensive as in other fields. However, realistic VR surgery simulations are in high demand as a result of offering risk-free training environments for physicians. The necessity of realism compels researchers to adopt physics-based models and haptic renderings that place extra computation burdens on real-time rendering pipelines. In this study, we investigate the usability of already built-in physics-based models in physics/or game engine PhysX library, for scooping operations in artificial cervical disc replacement (ACDR) surgery. The motivation behind our work is twofold. First, intricacies involved in ACDR surgery are introduced and the fundamental components towards the development of a surgical simulator are addressed. Second, an on-going framework development is introduced for the scooping action based on the PhysX library which provides optimized and physics-based methods for a plausible simulation. Our simulator framework integrates a haptic device into the PhysX environment for force feedback in order to increase plausibility.