Haptic rendering of tissue stiffness by the haptic enhanced reality method

Abstract

We have developed a prototype medical simulator that uses the haptic enhanced reality (HER) method. In this method, the force from a haptic device overlaps the reaction force from a base object. The key idea is to use a base object that has a material property similar to that of the target and to combine the virtual force produced by the haptic device with the reaction force from the base object. To confirm the feasibility of the proposed method, we conducted an experiment in which the stiffness at different points on a target liver was rendered based on the observed luminance at each point.