Deformable haptic rendering for volumetric medical image data

Virtual-reality-based surgical simulation is one of the most notable and practical applications of kinesthetic haptic rendering. With recent advances in volume visualization technology, simulators can now incorporate pre-operative medical image data for surgical planning or rehearsal. For a truly immersive, patient-specific simulation experience, versatile haptic rendering of volume data is needed. This article presents a method for haptic rendering of deformable isosurfaces embedded within volumetric data. The proxy-based algorithm operates on the original data volume, rather than on an alternate or derived representation, to preserve geometric accuracy. Real-time deformation is driven by a coarser mesh generated from the volume. We show that this approach has very favorable properties for an application in surgical simulation.