Haptic simulation of the milling process in temporal bone operations.

A VR-simulation system for educating surgeons of the temporal bone milling processes is presented in this paper. E.g. the milling process that occurs during the removal of certain cancer tumors in the brain. The research project is recently started up and this paper is an introduction to the bone milling simulation topic. We present how the graphical rendering of the temporal bone is done. Acquired data are managed using the Marching cubes algorithm to perform a visual representation. A re-production of iso-surfaces will represent the material removal occurred during the milling process. Force models are discussed and will be implemented in the H3D API, which is used to control the virtual simulation and collision detection. Equipment, implementation and future work are also presented in the paper.