Mandayam A. Srinivasan

PhD, Director MIT Touch Lab

”Multimodal Simulation of Tool - Tissue Interactions: Physics or Phiction?”

Given the complexity of tissue behavior and tool-tissue interactions, it is hard to imagine we will ever be able to have perfect simulations of medical procedures in virtual reality based systems for medical training.  However, since human trainees have sensorimotor and cognitive limitations, perfect simulations are not necessary. What level of approximation results in optimal training transfer
depends on the goals of training and complexity of the medical procedure. In this talk I will describe a taxonomy of approximations and illustrate it with examples from our work on real-time haptic and graphical simulation of tool-tissue interactions.