Impact Of Virtual Reality On Liver Surgical Planning Procedures : Concepts, Technologies, Tools and Case Studies

While remarkable progress has been achieved in the field of surgical techniques, only little efforts were spent on improving the pre-operative planning process. A successful surgical intervention is critically dependent on the surgical planning procedures, techniques and tools adopted. Effective liver treatment require optimal accurate and detailed understanding of interior liver structure in order to guide decisions whether a patient should and/or can undergo surgery or not. Traditional surgical planning is mainly centered on volumetric information stored in a stack of 2D images gained via CT scanners provided for surgons to build their own 3D model of liver, tumor and vasculare which is a challenging task without having possible truthful simulation of the actual resection. Our vision is to trasfer the pre-operative planning process from desktop based system to 3D stereoscopic virtual reality environment where planning gets easy and intuitive process in the clinical routine.