A Haptic and Virtual Reality Skull Bone Surgery Simulator

The work presented in this paper gives an introduction to the development of a simulator system based on a virtual reality representation of the human skull, from which both haptic and visual feedback is generated to simulate and animate the milling process in skull bone surgery. The system will be used to educate and train surgeons to do complicated skull bone operations, such as removal of cancer tumors. The skull bone data is taken from a CT-scan and visualized using a modified Marching cubes algorithm. Different haptic rendering algorithms of the bone milling process are discussed for implementation. An energy-based approach is used for modeling of material removed during the milling process. The topic is still young and unexplored; hence this paper discusses the different parts a bone milling VRsystem consists of and gives an insight into problems occurring in a VR bone milling process and presents solutions for some of these problems.