Haptics in Surgical Extended Reality

Virtual surgery provides an interactive platform for doctors to simulate clinical surgery in a 3D virtual environment. The advantages of noninvasiveness and repeatability enable virtual surgery to attract considerable attention in the last few decades. The development of the visualization of surgery simulation provides valuable platforms or tools for virtual surgical training. It is however still challenging to construct a high-fidelity surgical environment for surgical training/planning, clinical treatment, as well as telemedicine that has increased in demand as COVID-19 has spread globally over the past two years.

The rapid development of extended reality provides potential solutions for addressing the above challenge. Among the extended reality technologies, haptics enables users to perceive and manipulate virtual objects with both kinesthetic and cutaneous information, which can greatly enhance the immersive experience when presented concurrently with visual feedback.

Researchers have explored the effectiveness and efficiency of providing force feedback in some virtual surgery. Further studies are expected for exploring how to provide a natural visuo-haptic fusion experience for surgical applications using extended reality technologies.

This research topic seeks to promote innovative work for haptics in surgical extended reality, especially for, but not limited to haptic and visuo-haptic fusion technologies in applications of medical education, assistance, monitoring, and treatment:

- Haptic interface design for surgical training and assessment
- Visuo-haptic rendering for surgical training and assessment
- Haptic rendering for virtual/remote surgery
- Mid-air haptic rendering for virtual-real fusion
- Multimodal haptic interfaces or rendering technologies
- Machine/deep learning for novel haptics technologies
- Digital twin for operating theater
- Innovative uses of haptics in surgical applications

Keywords: Haptic for surgical training, Virtual surgery, surgery simulation, Extended Reality, Virtual Reality, Haptics modeling, Human Computer Interaction.

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