The Effect of Visual and Haptic Feedback on Manual and Teleoperated Needle Insertion

In this paper, we present a study that evaluates the effect of visual and haptic feedbacks and their relevance to human performance in a needle insertion task. A virtual needle insertion simulator with a four-layer tissue model (skin, fat, muscle, and bone) and haptic feedback is used for perceptual experiments. The task was to detect the puncture of a particular layer using haptic and visual cues provided by the simulation. The results show that the addition of force feedback reduces error in detection of transitions between tissue layers by at least 55%. The addition of real-time visual feedback (image overlay) improved user performance by at least 87% in scenarios without force feedback. Presentation of both force and visual feedback improved performance by at least 43% in comparison to scenarios without feedback. These results suggest that real-time image overlay provides greater improvement in performance than force feedback.