METHOD FOR VIRTUAL SURGERY OF THE NASAL CAVITY

Description

Currently, in the USA alone, about 370,000 operations are performed in the nasal passages with some type of congenital obstruction or disease and around 50% of them fail, which means serious economic losses in medicines, hospital stays and repetition of surgery. For this reason, it is necessary to optimize this type of surgical intervention as much as possible.
The present invention proposes a method and system to determine the relationship between the fluid-dynamic effects caused by morphological transformations in a nasal cavity, and its normal or abnormal physiological functioning. In particular, this invention solves the problems previously described by means of a technique for evaluating morphological transformations of a nasal cavity, which quantifies the properties of the resulting modified cavity from two dimensionless parameters, which combine morphological information from a three-dimensional model and results of numerical simulations of airflow through the nasal cavity.

Advantages

The current methods of virtual surgery are completely subjective, since the surgeon performs the operation of the virtual model of the nostril (prior to the real operation) based on his knowledge, experience and skill. However, with the present methodology, the surgeon is guided throughout the virtual operation based on the movement of mathematical estimators in a Cartesian plane, which change in value as the nasal morphology is modified. The operation ends when the estimators enter a region of high probability of success.

Uses and Applications

The present invention relates to the field of fluid dynamics, and more specifically, to a method and system for determining the relationship between fluid-dynamic effects caused by morphological transformations in a nasal cavity. Its uses and applications belong to the field of Health Sciences and more specifically, to the field of otorhinolaryngology.