Direct Haptic Volume Rendering in Lumbar Puncture Simulation

The preparation phase for surgical simulations often comprises the segmentation of patient data, which is needed for realistic visual and haptic rendering. Expert segmentation of 3D patient data sets can last from several hours to days. In this paper we introduce a direct haptic volume rendering approach for lumbar punctures. Preparation time spent for segmentation is much shorter and compared to our reference system nearly identical force output at the needle tip can be observed. The number of structures to be completely segmented by an expert is reduced from 11 to 3 tissues in abdominal data sets with 300 slices.