In obstetrics, it is difficult to teach instrumental delivery in situ, e.g. teaching the use of forceps when fetal malposition occurs. There is yet no simulator available that take into account different types of situations that enables the modification of tissue properties, interactions, and geometries. This lack of training yields to a lack of confidence in the inexperienced practitioners or midwife, increasing the rate of cesarean delivery.
In order to complete the training of the practitioners and midwife, we are developing an interactive simulator, based on a specific biomechanical model that can take into account the pelvic dynamics as well as the interaction with the fetus and the extraction instruments.
This simulator should answer the following requirements:
different morphologies and positions of the fetus should be available,
computation and visualization of the interaction constraints and deformations of the fetus, pelvic muscles and instruments should be possible, interaction in a virtual environment should be provided.
The key challenges mainly include:
definition of a biomechanical model, its material model and parameters (discrete and continuous hybrid deformable model), definition of the interaction models (collisions, sliding, friction and more generally continuous contacts), optimization of the computation in order to fulfill the interactive-time objective (CPU-GPU, adaptive or multi-scale geometry,...).