Providing Simulation of Medical Manipulation with Haptic Feedback

Abstract

Accompanying the progress of medical technology, all kinds of treatment and therapy are being practiced in healthcare industry. It is expected that the regional difference in terms of the quality of healthcare in the area of surgery could be reduced through the remote operations with the help of a robot-based surgery system. Such a remote surgery approach, however, is not yet practical, because it solely relies on the visual perception with no input for the haptic perception. Since it is a lot faster for a human being to sense through touching than by watching especially when he is manipulating an object, sensing through touching is considered essential to the success of remote surgery. In this research, a system that is able to sense through a force sensor is developed. The system simulates the process of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). PHANToM, a force sensing system, is employed for collecting the information for the haptic perception. With this force sensing system, it is possible to have force input in 6 degrees of freedom and force output in 3 degrees of freedom. OpenGL is used for the 3D graphics rendering in the visual information processing system. By synchronizing the information for both the visual and haptic perception, a virtual reality system that reacts to both the visual and force interactions has been developed. The simulation results reported in this paper proved that using the information collected through the force sensing system makes a significant difference in the medical treatment.