An accelerated haptic feedback algorithm utilizing volume reconstruction

Surgery simulation is playing an increasing role in medical education. A long standing problem in this area is how to integrate fast yet realistic haptic feedback to the system. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to accelerate the recently proposed volume-based haptic feedback approach. Unlike existing techniques that require separately scanning along all three axes, we only scan the volume once along one axis and recover the penetration information along the other two based on geometric constraints and heuristics. This significantly reduces the computational cost and doubles the haptic refresh rate, which significantly improves the stability of haptic feedback.