Once known within a small circle of community involved in its research and business, haptics is gaining broader consumer recognition with the introduction touch technology in the next generation of cell phones. Motorola and LG made news late last year with their incorporation of haptics technology in the touchscreens of their phones, enabling the user to realistically feel key strokes on the flat surface.

“Haptics”, a word of Greek etymology meaning “to touch”, refers to the modality of the sense of touch, as “vision” is to the sense of sight. With escalating technological growth, haptics has made inroads to applications such as mobile gadgetry, surgical simulation, rehabilitation, defense and even gaming.

Recently in the Centre for Image Analysis of Sweden’s Uppsala University, yet another application was made of haptics which may potentially change the practice of medical diagnosis in the future. Erik Vidholm’s PhD research combined haptics and visualization in medical image analysis to provide users with intuitive methods of image segmentation.

Most, if not all, are familiar with contemporary medical imaging methods such as X-rays, MRI, and CT scans. After a structure of a body, for example, is captured with MRI, the image is then segmented for analysis. Manual segmentation of such medical data remains a tedious task, while automatic segmentation is still undefined. Vidholm’s work provides a semi-automatic segmentation solution to this problem.

His solution distinguished itself from other semi-automatic segmentation methods with the combined use of haptics and visualization. With Vidholm’s WISH toolkit, users are able to guide the computer model as it attempts to automatically adapt to the medical image. Using haptics and stereographic display, the user will not only perceive 3D and depth, he will also receive tactile feedback. The user virtually feels the organ that he sees in front of him. The resulting model can then be examined and analyzed.

Vidholm’s result and solution meant that medical practitioners now have a more intuitive and better interaction in conducting medical image analysis, which in effect aids diagnosis, monitoring and surgery planning. Vidholm successfully defended his PhD thesis on February 8, 2008. The project now continues at the Centre for Image Analysis with further improvements and developments in the WISH toolkit by PhD student Filip Malmberg.

In addition, the Centre for Image Analysis is involved in yet another haptics and visualization project, this time, to produce ProViz, a visualization tool for macromolecular structures.

With the rapid development and application of haptics, would our lives be dramatically changed and improved by this emerging technology? I certainly wish so!

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Erik Vidholm’s PhD thesis can be downloaded here. His WISH toolkit, which uses H3D API, the open source haptics platform, is available for further research and can be downloaded here.