A Tangible Medical Image Processing Assistant with Haptic Modality

Recently, the progresses of human-computer interface technology implemented on tablet PCs (personal computers) enables medical workers to utilize them for communications between patients and doctors at the time of condition analysis and diagnosis. Because general patients cannot understand medical images alone, the technology assists them to intuitively understand the images and easily communicate with doctors. We propose a tangible medical image processing assistant with haptic modality. Our main goal is to construct a method allowing users to easily interacting and exploring medical images with haptic modality. Diagnostic imaging with a series of CT scan images is very important way for doctors to detect problems. Because the doctors need to view a huge number of high resolution images in a day, excessive burdens on their vision become a very serious problem. We propose a new method of assisting the diagnostic imaging with integrated visual and haptic channels. The proposed method extracts some visual features observed in the images and transforms to haptic parameters. Then, the system visually and haptically notifies the doctors for possible existence of suspicious findings in the images. It calls their attention to focus on the specific images to narrow the differential diagnosis of the images.