COLLABORATIVE THREE-DIMENSIONAL VIRTUAL NASAL SURGERY

摘要

Diagnosis and surgery plan for pathological noses are important issue to resolve Nasal Airway Obstruction (NAO), the feeling of discomfort during nasal breathing. Experimental studies on the nasal airflow inside pre- and post-surgery nasal cavity models created by CT/MRI images become the forefront in this research nowadays. Due to the complex nature of flow passage inside nose, creation of the anatomically accurate three-dimensional (3D) nasal cavity model and its variants, which simulate nasal surgery, from a series of two-dimensional (2D) image data was a difficult and time consuming work. Up to now in most laboratories, modification of pre-surgery model to make a post-surgery model has been done by a series of image correction in each 2D image. In this article, we propose a new method to create post-surgery models by 3D corrections of the pre-surgery models with introducing a haptic device. With given 3D pre-surgery model, multiple participants (medical doctors and engineers) can take part in the collaborative surgery using a haptic interface through shearing 3D view of the model. When they engage in this simulated surgery process, the proposed system provides the locking-based and real-time deformation of a removing target. During the surgery, an experienced doctor plays the role of a moderator and guides other users, based on the haptic surgery guidance. Airflows inside created pre- and post-surgery models were solved by a CFD code FLUENT (Materialized co, USA). Comparing the pre- and post-surgery results, we found out that some fluid mechanical variables could be the objective measure of NAO. From these result, the proposed virtual surgery method can be used clinically and educationally in the field of Otolaryngology.