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Virtual assembly of complex objects has application in domains ranging from surgery planning to archaeology. In these domains the objective is to plan the restoration of skeletal anatomy or archaeological artifacts to achieve an optimal reconstruction without causing further damage. While graphical modeling plays a central role in virtual assembly, visual feedback alone is often insufficient since object contact and penetration is difficult to discern due to occlusion. Haptics can improve an assembly task by giving feedback when objects collide, but precise fitting of fractured objects guided by delicate haptic cues similar to those present in the physical world requires haptic display transparency beyond the performance of today’s systems. We propose a haptic alignment tool that combines a 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) attraction force with traditional 6 DOF contact forces to pull a virtual object towards a local stable fit with a fixed object. The object forces are integrated into a virtual coupling framework yielding a stable haptic tool. We demonstrate the use of our system on applications from both cranio-maxillofacial surgery and archaeology, and show that we can achieve haptic rates for fractured surfaces with over 5000 points.

Cranio-maxillofacial (CMF) surgery to restore normal skeletal anatomy in patients with serious trauma to the face can be both complex and time-consuming. But it is generally accepted that careful pre-operative planning leads to a better outcome with a higher degree of function and reduced morbidity in addition to reduced time in the operating room. However, today's surgery planning systems are primitive, relying mostly on the user's ability to plan complex tasks with a two-dimensional graphical interface. A system for planning the restoration of skeletal anatomy in facial trauma patients using a virtual model derived from patient-specific CT data. The system combines stereo visualization with six degrees-of-freedom, high-fidelity haptic feedback that enables analysis, planning, and preoperative testing of alternative solutions for restoring bone fragments to their proper positions. The stereo display provides accurate visual spatial perception, and the haptics system provides intuitive haptic feedback when bone fragments are in contact as well as six degrees-of-freedom attraction forces for precise bone fragment alignment. A senior surgeon without prior experience of the system received 45 min of system training. Following the training session, he completed a virtual reconstruction in 22 min of a complex mandibular fracture with an adequately reduced result. Preliminary testing with one surgeon indicates that our surgery planning system, which combines stereo visualization with sophisticated haptics, has the potential to become a powerful tool for CMF surgery planning. With little training, it allows a surgeon to complete a complex plan in a short amount of time.

The management of complex mandible fractures, i.e severely comminuted or fractures of edentulous/atrophic mandibles, can be challenging. This is due to the three-dimensional loss of bone, which limits the possibility for accurate anatomic reduction. Virtual surgery planning (VSP) can provide improved accuracy and shorter operating times, but is often not employed for trauma cases because of time constraints and complex user interfaces limited to two-dimensional interaction with three-dimensional data. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy, precision, and time efficiency of the Haptic Assisted Surgery Planning system (HASP), an in-house VSP system that supports stereo graphics, six degrees-of-freedom input and haptics, to improve the surgical planning. Three operators performed planning in HASP on Computed Tomography (CT) and Come Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) images of a plastic skull model and on twelve retrospective cases with complex mandible fractures. The result shows an accuracy and reproducibility of less than 2mm when using HASP, with an average planning time of 15 minutes, including time for segmentation in the software BoneSplit. This study presents an in-house haptic assisted planning tool for cranio-maxillofacial surgery with high usability that can be used for preoperative planning and evaluation of complex mandible fractures. 

Real‐time virtual reality requires efficient rendering methods to deal with high‐ resolution stereoscopic displays and low latency head‐tracking. Our proposed RayCaching method renders isosurfaces of large volume datasets by amortizing raycasting over several frames and caching primary rays as small bricks that can be efficiently rasterized. An occupancy map in form of a clipmap provides level of detail and ensures that only bricks corresponding to visible points on the isosurface are being cached and rendered. Hard shadows and ambient occlusion from secondary rays are also accumulated and stored in the cache. Our method supports real‐time isosurface rendering with dynamic isovalue and allows stereoscopic visualization and exploration of large volume datasets at framerates suitable for virtual reality applications.

Active grid cells in scalar volume data are typically identified by many isosurface rendering methods when extracting another representation of the data for rendering. However, the use of grid cells themselves as rendering primitives is not extensively explored in the literature. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based data structure for storing the data of active grid cells for fast cell rasterisation via billboard splatting. Compared to previous cell rasterisation approaches, eight corner scalar values are stored with each active grid cell, so that the full volume data is not required during rendering. The grid cells can be quickly extracted and use about 37 percent memory compared to a typical efficient mesh-based representation, while supporting large grid sizes. We present further improvements such as a visibility buffer for cluster culling and EWA-based interpolation of attributes such as normals. We also show that our data structure can be used for hybrid ray tracing or path tracing to compute global illumination.

Exploiting parallelism in haptic rendering algorithms for rigid body collision simulation can be difficult due to the haptic feedback loop imposing strict real-time constraints on the computations. In this paper, we show that the classical Voxmap PointShell algorithm can be efficiently vectorised via the single-program multiple-data (SPMD) programming model of the Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) compiler and programming language. Our vectorised version provides an average 3.0x speedup compared to a corresponding scalar implementation, for a static hierarchical pointshell on a single CPU core. In addition, we propose a dynamic pointshell that does not require any pre-processing and allows a fixed point budget to be set per frame. The speedup obtained by the vectorisation means that a larger number of contact queries can be processed per haptic frame, while maintaining a desired haptic framerate. In an empirical study, we demonstrate that this increased fidelity in collision simulation translates directly to a higher user accuracy in assembly of fractured virtual objects.