Last week I began this four part series covering the scholars that have recently won awards from the Council of Graduate Schools and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses at various regional CGS conferences. You can take a look back and read the original intro, as well as the first post of the series, here.

Today I continue the series by introducing you to Dr. Orcun Goksel from The University of British Columbia. Orcun received the Innovation & Technology Award for his thesis entitled "Meshing and Rendering of Patient-Specific Deformation Models with Application to Needle Insertion Simulation." Essentially, Orcun's thesis proposed a way to map a 3D model image that helps surgeons simulate surgery. This is necessary because minimally invasive surgery is very detailed and requires a great deal of training. By using this 3D simulator surgeons can train extensively and practice for the real thing. As Orcun pointed out, think of a pilot using a flight simulator to train for flight. Furthermore, using the flight simulator analogy, when a pilot steers the flight simulator they get feedback and the simulator actually feels like its moving -- in the same sense, the model that Orcun's thesis describes would provide what he called "haptic" feedback. In other words, a surgeon practicing on this 3D model controls a robotic needle, and when that robotic needle pushes something or pierces something during the simulation, there is resistance as there would be in an actual surgery. Now if Orcun is reading this, I hope he can forgive me, because I probably got a few things incorrect -- "so why did you even try to summarize this?" one might ask. Well I did get the gist of it, and I don't have a technological background, so that goes to show you how well Orcun explained this to everyone. It can be difficult to communicate this type of detail to an audience not familiar with the field, but Orcun did a wonderful job and it was a pleasure to hear him speak about his work. For a more detailed (and surely more accurate) description of what his thesis covered you can view the abstract below, as it appeared in awards program. Congratulations Orcun!