Session Abstract

Advances in computing technology along with input and output devices have provided the opportunity for sophisticated surgical simulation technology. With the help of funding from NIH, our group has been active in the development, assessment and validation of a system for virtual ear surgery. Our system joins software built by our team with commodity, off-the-shelf hardware. The overall project consists of efforts in image data acquisition, image data processing, rendering of visual, aural and haptic display using an iterative design and validation process that involves 11 university-based healthcare training institutions across the country. These institutions are connected to central servers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and each requires internet connectivity for large image data file upload, software maintenance, user assistance and performance data download. As these systems are for research purposes and require remote access, they need to provide connectivity outside of the standard restrictive firewalls that most institutions maintain to protect patient information. Because relatively large data sets are transferred, hardwire access is necessary to maintain adequate speeds of exchange. Most institutions provide unprotected public Wi-Fi that are outside the secure wired hospital networks, however these are not sufficient for our purposes. Additional issues arise from remote maintenance including verifying stereo visual and haptic display on the local machine. In the future, this system could be used for pre-operative planning and interactive case rehearsal, which would require higher security and higher bandwidth to deliver patient-specific data to experts throughout the country. During this session, our system and current research program will be demonstrated and discussion surrounding the above issues will be presented.