Safe and successful surgical intervention requires careful planning and precise technical execution. The ideal surgical education and training environment would include repetition, reinforcement, review, and re-evaluation to speed the achievement of required performance levels, focus trainees on critical tasks, and promote the development of competent intraoperative decision making. In practice, students learn how to operate by practicing, under supervision, on real patients. This method subverts the desired objectives due to uncontrollable factors such as random patient availability and diverse disease presentation. An interactive virtual surgical training environment provides a promising alternative by potentially reducing medical error rates, improving the accuracy of intraoperative judgments, and increasing efficiency without the risk to living patients.

A good first step for creating a full surgical trainer is the development of a fractured femur simulator that provides medical personnel with hands-on experience in managing various types of fractures without risk to a human patient. This paper describes ongoing work to develop such a simulation, and includes a discussion of the following:

1. Development a of medical Haptic device tool kit.

2. Development of an instructional plan.

3. Creation of six training modules.

4. Assembly of an integrated system architecture for a full femoral procedure.

5. Assessing of the computational, force feedback, and display latency as well as haptic and visual fidelity to judge the overall ability of the system to replicate conditions in an actual medical procedure.

The modules are used to teach a student through a series of exercises that develop the cognitive and psychomotor skills required to perform the outcome procedure. We conclude by discussing how to transform this special purpose simulation into a general-purpose surgical training simulator.