DOD FY14 Combat Casualty Training Initiative Virtual Tissue Advancement Research Program

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The Combat Casualty Training Initiative (CCTI) Virtual Tissue Advancement Research Program Announcement is being offered for the first time in FY14. It seeks to advance the state of research under the CCTI by advancing the state of virtual tissues for use in surgical and other interventional procedure and skill simulation systems. The CCTI is primarily focused on the research and, ultimately, the development of medical training methods, technologies, systems, and competency assessment tools for the attainment and sustainment of military medical readiness. The CCTI advances these goals through research and development projects related to trauma care, surgical procedures, general surgery, and interventional procedures / skills. The results of this effort are intended to improve the fidelity of virtual reality human tissue and anatomical interactions to further the abilities to construct realistic procedural surgical and interventional training systems. It is anticipated that research will lead to better methods to accurately simulate regional anatomic interactions, aggregated tissues (where different tissues connect and interact with each other), organ and structure interactions, organ physical properties as well as structure and tissue properties (here-in-after referred to as ‘human tissue’). Research of the human tissue properties should include a prototype online interactive knowledge repository or library. Inclusion of an open access interactive research library prototype as part of the research effort will greatly expand the impact of the research. It is also envisioned that such research will lead to more realistic acting surgical and interventional-type simulations for the purposes of providing superior contact, cutting, dissection, approximation, movement and deformation properties that can be measured graphically and ‘haptically’ against known and, insome instances, currently unknown physical standards. Open access, open source or open modelapproaches are highly encouraged. This announcement is not an attempt to rid the art of creating medical models, but to provide theopportunity for developers and end-users to eventually have access to validated human tissues to create models for the purposes of medical training and education.

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