Liver of the 'visible man'

Endoscopic surgery, also called minimally invasive surgery, is presumed drastically to reduce postoperative morbidity and thus to offer both human and economic benefits. For the surgeon, however, this approach leads to a number of gestural challenges that require extensive training to be mastered. In order to replace experimentation on animals and patients, we developed a simulator for endoscopic surgery. To achieve this goal, a first step was to develop a working prototype, a 'standard patient,' on which the informatic and microengineering tools could be validated. We used the visible man dataset for this purpose. The external shape of the visible man's liver, his biliary passages, and his extrahepatic portal system turned out to he fully within the standard pattern of normal anatomy. Anatomic variations were observed in the intrahepatic right portal vein, the hepatic veins, and the arterial blood supply to the liver. Thus, the visible man dataset reveals itself to be well suited for the simulation of minimally invasive surgical operation such as endoscopic cholecystectomy.