Virtual Reality technology brings numerous advantages to many different application fields and allows the building of new methods to carry out a realistic and useful simulation.
The aim of this research activity is to combine virtual reality technology and medical image processing in order to build a realist virtual simulator with haptic sensations and real-time interactions.
These simulators could be utilized in the anatomical education field and in the surgical training. By means of this kind of simulators it is possible to model unusual and rare cases and to practise new procedures avoiding risk for real patients; in addition, it is possible to have objective measures of surgical skill.
The most critical issues in designing surgical simulators are the accuracy in order to generate visual and haptic sensations very close to the reality and the efficiency in order to obtain deformations rendered in real-time. Accuracy and efficiency are two opposite requirements; in fact, increased accuracy implies higher computational time and vice versa. So, it is necessary to find a trade-off according to the application.