For the final project of my haptics class, I worked with a team of 2 other grad students to develop a simulation of the surgical workspace of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. One of the main issues with this procedure is that surgeons loose track of where they are in the workspace, causing them to potentially miss one of the sites they need to ablate in order to fully disconnect the blood flow between the twins. Our goal was to see how visual and haptic fixtures could help surgeons navigate the workspace and assist with their proprioception.

 

The simulation: We developed this project in Unity. I created the model of the placenta using blender, and we altered the Geomagic Touch haptic device unity drivers in order to create haptic fixtures that allow the user to interact with the space and pull them back to the spots that they have previously marked for ablation. We also created visual fixtures to assist the user in navigating the space. All of the coding for this project was done in C#. This project is being continued into a conference paper.