Real-time haptic and visual simulation of bone dissection

Bone dissection is an important component of many surgical procedures. In this paper, we discuss a haptic and visual simulation of a bone-cutting burr that is being developed as a component of a training system for temporal bone surgery. We use a physically motivated model to describe the burr-bone interaction, which includes haptic forces evaluation, the bone erosion process, and the resulting debris. The current implementation, directly operating on a voxel discretization of patient-specific 3D CT and MR imaging data, is efficient enough to provide real-time feedback on a low-end multiprocessing PC platform.