Conference Agenda

Preoperative planning plays a critical role in Cranio-Maxillofacial surgery, where an accurate definition of osteotomy planes is essential to ensure optimal functional and aesthetic outcomes. While Virtual Surgical Planning (VSP) systems have improved process digitalization, most approaches still rely on bi-dimensional interfaces that limit spatial understanding and intuitive interaction with 3D data.

To address these limitations, this work presents an immersive Virtual Reality framework integrating multi-modal interaction to support preoperative planning tasks and enabling direct manipulation of patient-specific models and definition of osteotomy planes.

An experimental study evaluated the effect of different interaction modalities on users performance. Ten synthetic mandibular lesion cases were generated, and expert-defined osteotomy planes were used as reference that participants were asked to reproduce using both VR controller- and haptic-based interaction modalities, with performance assessed in terms of geometric accuracy and task completion time.

Results show that the haptic modality increases completion time while reducing extreme angular errors and improving consistency, with a trend toward improved angular accuracy. These findings underline the impact of interaction design on VSP, suggesting that haptics can enhance reliability in critical tasks despite increased execution time, contributing to the development of more effective immersive planning tools.