DefinePK

Abstract

This research is about obtaining the realism in virtual heart surgery. Normally, novice cardiac surgeons learn the surgery by observing the experts perform the operation on a patient. The physical involvement from these novice cardiac surgeons is very minimal. As such, virtual surgery might help in simulating the cardiac surgery and provide the feeling of doing a real surgery without putting any patients’ life at risk. The main challenge in virtual surgery is to ensure the 3D model of the heart is as realistic as the real heart. Currently artificial 3D heart is used in virtual cardiac surgery. In order to provide realism in the virtual surgery, MRI are used to capture the internal part of the heart and camera-captured images are used to portray the external part. The MRI slices are combined to create a 3D heart. In order to increase the accuracy of the texture mapping, the captured image are transformed into 3D points of cloud based on the depth of the surface, before they can be mapped on the 3D heart. These two types of images (MRI slices and camera captured) are taken from real patients. Here, MRI and point clouds provide accuracy and the captured images provide realism.