Surgical training on the web

The World Wide Web has become part of our lives by providing services across a wide spectrum of fields. However, the capabilities of the web have not yet been fully exploited. Two years ago the web was largely a distributed information repository, when it had the potential to become a distributed computing environment. This paper looks at the potential for the web to host scientific applications. We review current technologies, and present examples of web-based applications. Our own interest is surgical simulation as a web-based application, and we describe one particular application, to train radiologists on minimally invasive procedures. This provides a training environment which models anatomical structures as well as surgical tools, and simulates the behaviour of the surgical tool under user manipulation.