Will haptic feedback speed up medical imaging? An application to radiation treatment planning

Haptic technology enables us to incorporate the sense of touch into computer applications, providing an additional input/output channel. The purpose of this study was to examine if haptic feedback can help physicians and other practitioners to interact with medical imaging and treatment planning systems. A haptic application for outlining target areas (a key task in radiation therapy treatment planning) was implemented and then evaluated via a controlled experiment with ten subjects. Even though the sample size was small, and the application only a prototype, results showed that haptic feedback can significantly increase (p<0.05) the speed of outlining target volumes and organs at risk. No significant differences were found regarding precision or perceived usability. This promising result warrants further development of a full haptic application for this task. Improvements to the usability of the application as well as to the forces generated have been implemented and an experiment with more subjects is planned.

[1]  Ingela Nyström,et al.  A haptic interaction technique for volume images based on gradient diffusion , 2005, First Joint Eurohaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems. World Haptics Conference.

[2]  E. Jaramillo,et al.  Virtual reality colonoscopy simulation: a compulsory practice for the future colonoscopist? , 2005, Endoscopy.

[3]  Hiroshi Oyama,et al.  Interaction model between elastic objects for haptic feedback considering collisions of soft tissue , 2005, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[4]  Eva-Lotta Sallnäs,et al.  The effect of modality on social presence, presence and performance in collaborative virtual environments , 2004 .

[5]  W. Buxton.  Human-Computer Interaction , 1988, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

[6]  Mario J. Enriquez,et al.  A pneumatic tactile alerting system for the driving environment , 2001, PUI '01.

[7]  Mark A. Ganter,et al.  Real-time finite element modeling for surgery simulation: an application to virtual suturing , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[8]  Anders Ynnerman,et al.  A haptic interface for dose planning in stereo-tactic radiosurgery , 2004, Proceedings. Eighth International Conference on Information Visualisation, 2004. IV 2004..

[9]  Grigore C. Burdea,et al.  Force and Touch Feedback for Virtual Reality , 1996 .