Incremental potential field based haptic guidance for medical simulation

Haptics provide an effective means to improve the realism of virtual worlds. It allows a user to feel either reaction forces from virtual interactions or reaction forces reflected from a remote site during a bilateral teleoperation task. With our proposed haptic guidance method based on an incremental potential field, a user is physically guided through the ideal motion path by a haptic interfacing device, giving the subject a kinesthetic understanding of the task. This is used in our simulation of tracheal reconstruction surgery to investigate the feasibility of deploying new tracheal implants. The proposed method is also applicable for edutainment demonstrated by a simple interactive simulation with a “Rubber Duck”. Both guidance and reaction forces are modeled in our simulation system.