Haptic rendering of tissue cutting with scissors.

Current surgical simulations that involve cutting with scissors lack display of forces "between the fingers" of the operator. The objective of this work is to develop a fast, realistic haptic rendering technique for scissor cutting that can be easily integrated into soft tissue models commonly used in surgical simulators. A virtual environment was created for combined graphic and haptic display of cutting. Two 2-dimensional deformable mass-spring-damper models were developed: The first is a large mesh that is used to calculate translational forces. The second is a smaller, one-element-thick mesh that is used to calculate cutting (angular) forces. This technique was implemented on the haptic scissors, a haptic interface that allows motion and force feedback in translation and cutting.