Development of original three dimensional positioning system for operating simulators

Surgical simulators are a computer technology developed to simulate surgical procedures to train medical specialists without the need for patients, cadavers or animals. As medical procedures are vital, the training of specialists who perform these procedures is important. With this technology, specialists are trained to perform medical procedures. Visual realism and real-time interactions are important in surgical simulations. Real-time interaction requires the expert to produce an instantaneous response to the process in any medical procedure. The instantaneous responses that the expert perceives, so haptic feedback, have great importance in surgical simulators. Haptic feedback and the accuracy of the virtual environment depend on the correct positioning of the surgical instrument. In the position estimation exercises used in surgical simulator applications, The real-time implementation of the application is critical. In this thesis study, the real time application was made at low cost, using the cameras taken from the market. Different methods have been tried and studied for 3D position estimation for surgical simulators. Firstly with a single camera position determination was made in the spherical coordinate system. Then, with two cameras, position determination is made in the prenciple of stereo vision and the cartesian coordinate system. 30 images must be received and processed in order for the application to give the user a sense of real environment. It is seen that the methods used make the position estimation with the desired error rates. With web cams taken from the market, 30 images per second could not be reached and it has been observed that the applied methods are affected by the ambient conditions. For this reason, Raspberry Pi camera modules have been used to increase the number of images and to eliminate the problem of environmental influences. With these modules used, it is seen that position estimation is done without being affected by ambient conditions. At the same time, the processing speed has been increased and the desired FPS value has been reached.