IEEE Transactions on Haptics Call for Papers

The clinical skills of medical professionals rely strongly on the sense of touch, combined with anatomical and diagnostic knowledge. Haptic exploratory procedures allow the expert to detect anomalies via gross and fine palpation, squeezing, and contour following. Haptic feedback is also key to medical interventions, for example when an anaesthetist inserts an epidural needle, a surgeon makes an incision, a dental surgeon drills into a carious lesion, or a veterinarian sutures a wound. Yet current trends in medical technology and training methods involve less haptic feedback to clinicians and trainees. For example, minimally invasive surgery removes the direct contact between the patient and clinician that gives rise to natural haptic feedback. In addition, computer-based simulations are being used to provide objective performance evaluations and make training more efficient. The science and technology of haptics thus has great potential to affect the performance of medical procedures and learning of clinical skills. This special issue is about understanding the role of touch in medicine and clinical skill acquisition. Topics of interest include:
 
1. Haptic environment properties and human haptic perception as relevant to medical examinations and procedures: Characterization of the nature of haptic information, and how it is perceived, is necessary to understand how medical professionals use haptics to enable learning and achieve high levels of performance. Papers that explore haptic models of the patient, as well as perceptual or behavioral aspects of the haptic modality relevant to medical examinations and procedures, are solicited.
 
2. Haptic systems and the role of haptics in training and evaluating clinical skills: Haptic simulators address a growing need for effective training and evaluation of clinical skills. Such simulators can be applied in a wide variety of medical professions and disciplines, including surgery, interventional radiology, anaesthesiology, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the allied health professions. These simulators rely on both technology development (devices, software, and systems) and an understanding of how humans use haptic feedback to perform established clinical skills or learn novel skills. Papers that address simulator development and/or evaluation from these perspectives are solicited.
 
3. Using haptics to improve the performance of medical interventions: Current trends in minimally invasive surgery (especially robot-assisted surgery) remove direct contact between the patient and the clinician. In addition, some medical interventions, such as percutaneous (e.g., needle-based) therapies, inherently provide little or confounded haptic feedback to the clinician. Bilateral teleoperators, tactile sensing/display devices, sensory substitutions systems, and other methods to enhance haptic feedback to a clinician could improve the performance of interventions. Papers that address technological approaches and their evaluation, as well as how humans use haptics (natural or with artificial haptic feedback) to accomplish medical tasks with better performance are solicited.
 
Timeline
15 September 2010       Deadline for submission of papers
15 December 2010        First decisions to authors
21 March 2011               Second decisions to authors
22 April 2011                  Final publication materials due from authors
15 June 2011                 Special issue publication
 
Submission Process
Visit http://www.computer.org/toh to view formatting requirements, and submit your paper at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs ieee. When uploading your paper, please select the appropriate special issue title under the category “Manuscript Type”. Questions about this process should be directed to the journal administrator, Mr. Joel T. Luber, at toh at computer.org. For more information about this special issue, contact any of the Guest Editors below.
 

Guest Editors

Dr. Allison M. Okamura, Johns Hopkins University (aokamura at jhu.edu)
Dr. Cagatay Basdogan, Koc University (cbasdogan at ku.edu.tr)
Dr. Sarah Baillie, The Royal Veterinary College, University of London (sbaillie at rvc.ac.uk)
Dr. William Harwin, University of Reading (w.s.harwin at reading.ac.uk)

Prof. Cagatay Basdogan
College of Engineering, Room: ENG-247
Koc University (http://www.ku.edu.tr )
Sariyer, Istanbul, TURKEY 34450
Phone: 90+ 212 338 1721
Fax:     90+ 212 338 1548
e-mail: cbasdogan at ku.edu.tr
http://portal.ku.edu.tr/~cbasdogan