Design of a Virtual Reality Haptic Robotic Central Venous Catheterization Training Simulator

Central venous catheterization (CVC) is a medical procedure where a surgeon attempts to place a catheter in the jugular, subclavian, or femoral vein. While useful, this procedure places patients at risk of a wide variety of adverse effects. Traditionally, training is performed on CVC mannequins, but these mannequins cannot vary patient anatomy. This work describes the development of a mobile training platform utilizing a haptic robotic arm and electromagnetic tracker to simulate a CVC needle insertion. A haptic robotic arm with custom syringe attachment used force feedback to provide the feeling of a needle insertion. A virtual ultrasound environment was created and made navigable by a mock ultrasound probe containing a magnetic tracking device. The effectiveness of the system as a training tool was tested on 12 medical students without CVC experience. An average increase in successful first insertion of 4.2% per practice scenario was seen in students who trained exclusively on the robotic training device. The robotic training device was able to successfully vary the difficulty of the virtual patient scenarios which in turn affected the success rates of the medical students. These results show that this system has the potential to successfully train medical residents for future CVC insertions.