Development of artificial tissue-like structures for a hybrid epidural anesthesia simulator.

Puncturing the epidural space and lumbar puncture are common procedures in anesthesia. They are carried out blind, where a needle is advanced from posterior between two adjacent vertebrae. Two different approaches are common practice for this technique, the midline and the paramedian one. The learning curve characteristics of both approaches significantly depends on the number of punctures carried out by a medical novice. For the training of these blind procedures a hybrid simulator requires artificial structures imitating the tissues which are penetrated by the needle. Within this work a patient phantom for spinal needle insertion procedures was developed and validated successfully against literature as well as by a study carried out with medical experts.