Distributed Virtual Environment for Volume Based Surgical Simulation via the World Wide Web

Educating and training a surgeon requires much time because a surgeon has few opportunities to rehearsal surgical modalities on patients. This study proposes a low-cost and widelyavailable distributed VR architecture via the WWW to solve this problem. In this architecture, Web pages from the server drive VR I/O devices on clients to enable users to immerse in avirtual environment. This process is different from the conventional approach that the server is responsible for most works and devices. Methods of driving the devices on clients and beingcalled by the Web page are introduced herein. This paper focuses on the application of volume based surgical simulations that is usually considered involving much computation and expensive workstations. A system that uses PC platforms and the WWW media was built to support the distributed VR surgical simulation. This paper introduces the algorithms for surgical simulation, isosurface reconstruction and rendition, and the methods by which clients can cooperate with the server. A simulation example of musculoskeletal surgery is present.