Introduction of the SinaSim: a Low-Cost Laparoscopic Surgery Simulator Using Virtual Reality Environment

Virtual reality based minimally invasive surgical trainers have beenproved to be highly effective for training of surgical residents before clinical practice.In this article we introduce the SinaSim, a low-cost laparoscopic surgery simulatorbased on virtual reality environment. The most important part in developing a virtual reality system is tomaking the virtual reality software of a surgical practice and modeling the physicalproperties and reaction of soft tissues in real time. At SinaSim we used a newlydeveloped graphical engine to minimize the cost and maximize the widespreadusage of this system. Screenshots of the final graphical view of each training task as well asgraphical user interface which provides the trainees with necessary informationabout their learning progress, are included in this report. The preliminary results of this study shows that the performance ofboth hardware and software of the SinaSim laparoscopic surgery simulator arecomparable with a commercial virtual reality based trainer in spite of its lowerfinal price.