Will haptic feedback speed up medical imaging? An application to radiation treatment planning.

Haptic technology enables us to incorporate the sense of touch into computer applications, providing an additional input/ output channel. The purpose of this study was to examine if haptic feedback can help physicians and other practitioners to interact with medical imaging and treatment planning systems. A haptic application for outlining target areas (a key task in radiation therapy treatment planning) was implemented and then evaluated via a controlled experiment with ten subjects.