Spherical Harmonic Representation based Haptic Rendering for Medical Image Perception

Introduction: Medical images generated in MRI are loaded with large amounts of information, posing challenges for human sight to identify and perceive the level of detail provided within these images. A solution is to use additional senses, such as the sense of touch, which is known as haptics. Haptics is also referred to as the technology of generating artificial sense of touch by interacting with objects in virtual space. The use of visual interpretation in conjunction with a haptic device can provide a higher level of perception towards diagnosis and treatment planning. A haptic device, such as the one shown in Figure 1, provides forced feedback to the user and can be employed as an object probing tool that is defined in virtual space. The haptic device used here is a two-way interface for defining the position and orientation of the probe and providing virtual reaction feedback in terms of a force and torque response to the user. The addition of a haptic device is shown to have improved interaction, as the depth cue added by touch elucidates ambiguities identified in the 2D image of a 3D virtual object.