Intracorporeal suturing and knot tying in surgical simulation.

Intracorporeal suturing and knot tying is one of the most difficult tasks to perform during minimally invasive surgery. To master these tasks the student requires extensive training in a real or simulated environment. Realistic simulation of suturing and knot tying is a challenging task, the dynamic behaviors of the needle and thread are complicated to calculate efficiently in real time. We present our approach to simulated training of intracorporeal suturing and knot tying as well as our method for performance assessment. Different algorithms for physical modeling of suture thread dynamics are examined and evaluated.