Haptic and visual rendering of virtual bone surgery: A physically realistic voxel-based approach

A physics-based haptic surgical simulator for bone surgery is presented. The simulator uses voxels to represent virtual bones obtained from CT or MRI data. We use a analytical force model of bone milling process to calculate interaction forces. The analytical model considers the interior structure and the mechanical properties of heterogeneous bone. A real-time voxel-based implementation of the model is described using a 3DOF haptic device. 3D texture-based volume rendering is used to display the bone and to visually remove bone material due to drilling in real-time.