Energy-based haptic rendering for real-time surgical simulation

Haptic-based surgical simulation is widely utilized for training surgical skills. However, simulating the interaction between rigid surgical instruments and soft tissues presents significant technical challenges. In this paper, we propose an energy-based haptic rendering method to achieve both large deformations and rigid–soft haptic interaction. Different from existing methods, both the rigid tools and soft tissues are modeled by an energy-based virtual coupling system. The constraints of soft deformation, tool-object interaction and haptic rendering are defined by potential energy. Benefit from energy-based constraints, we can realize complex surgical operations, such as inserting tools into soft tissue. The virtual coupling of soft tissue enables the separation of haptic interaction into two components: soft deformation with high computational complexity, and high-frequency haptic rendering. The soft deformation with shape constraints is accelerated GPU at a relatively low frequency(60Hz ∼ 100Hz), while the haptic rendering runs in another thread at a high frequency (≥ 1000Hz). We have implemented haptic simulation for two commonly used surgical operations, pressing and pulling. The experimental results show that our method can achieve stable feedback force and non-penetration between the tool and soft tissue under the condition of large soft deformation.