Expert Evaluation of Haptic Virtual Reality User Interfaces for Medical Landmarking

Three-dimensional (3D) models have widely been used in medical diagnosis and planning tasks. Haptic virtual reality (VR) interfaces implemented by using VR equipment and haptic devices have previously been proposed for these medical 3D manipulation tasks. They have been found to be faster and more accurate in a medical marking task with novel users, compared with the traditional 2D interaction technique that uses a mouse and a 2D display. In this study, we recruited medical experts who do the medical landmarking task as part of their daily work to examine the performance of haptic VR interfaces and to investigate experts' user experience. There were no statistically significant differences between the haptic user interfaces and the mouse-based 2D interface in terms of task completion time and marking accuracy. Based on experts' subjective data, haptic VR interfaces showed great potential for medical work because of the natural input methods and haptic feedback.