Visualization of needle access pathway and a five-DoF evaluation.

It is a common practice nowadays to plan needle access pathways to the volumetric organs before performing surgeries. An enormous amount of needle access planning systems has been proposed in recent years. Recent works mainly focus on the system usability or target accessibility.

A serious game for learning ultrasound-guided needle placement skills.

Ultrasound-guided needle placement is a key step in a lot of radiological intervention procedures such as biopsy, local anesthesia and fluid drainage. To help training future intervention radiologists, we develop a serious game to teach the skills involved. We introduce novel techniques for realistic simulation and integrate game elements for active and effective learning.

A virtual reality simulator for ultrasound-guided biopsy training.

A VR-based training system for practicing biopsies simulates ultrasound imagery by stitching multiple ultrasound volumes on the basis of a 3D scale-invariant feature transform algorithm. In addition, a six-degree-of-freedom force model delivers a realistic haptic rendering of needle insertion.

An ultrasound-guided organ biopsy simulation with 6DOF haptic feedback.

Ultrasound-guided biopsy is one of the most fundamental, but difficult, skills to acquire in interventional radiology. Intensive training, especially in the needle insertion, is required for trainee radiologists to perform safe procedures. In this paper, we propose a virtual reality simulation system to facilitate the training of radiologists and physicians in this procedures.