Conventional open-heart coronary bypass surgery requires a 30-cm long incision through the breast-bone and stopping the beating heart, which inflict great pain, trauma and lengthy recovery time to patients. Recently, a robot-assisted minimally invasive surgical technique has been introduced to coronary bypass to minimize incisions and avoid cardiac arrest in order to eliminate the medical complications associated with open-heart surgery. Despite its initial success, this innovation has its own limitations and problems. This paper discusses these limitations and proposes a framework that incorporates image-guidance techniques into MIRCAB surgery. We present two aspects of our preliminary work; 1) A Virtual Cardiac Surgical Planning system developed to visualize and manipulate simulated robotic surgical tools within the virtual patient. 2) Our work towards the extension of the static planning system to a dynamic situation that would model the position, orientation and dynamics of the heart, relative to the chest wall, during surgery.
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