A Haptic and Virtual Reality Temporal Bone Surgery Simulator

The work presented here describes the development of a surgical training for the milling process in temporal bone surgery. The system will be used to educate and train surgeons to do simulation of 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. In this application we use a voxel-based haptic rendering method, which uses the voxels density values for force modeling. This gives a more realistic force feedback than using the more common geometrical based haptic rendering method. 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 VR-system consists of and gives an insight into problems occurring in a VR bone milling process and presents solutions for some of these problems. An overview of the haptic loop and graphic loop communication is also given.