Haptic rendering of tissue boundary for surgical training

Haptic rendering of complex scenes is becoming more and more important with the development of the virtual reality in surgical simulation. This paper studies the haptic rendering of the boundaries between tissues with different physical properties which is one of the common problems in complex scene simulation. Three indexes, boundary perceptibility, boundary force stability and plane height stability, are proposed to evaluate the fidelity of haptic boundary rendering. We have introduced two haptic rendering methods on the boundary, gray area method and virtual interface method to simulate two types of force feelings which are categorized into foggy boundary and clear boundary. And three experiments including haptic rendering for foggy boundary, sensing shape of boundary and tooth section simulation, have been done to prove the validity of the methods on the haptic rendering of boundary.