Lumbar punctures are performed for diagnosis and therapy by inserting a needle into the spinal chord of the patient to inject medicaments or extract liquor. The training of this procedure is usually done guided by experienced supervisors directly in contact with the patient. A virtual reality lumbar puncture simulator has been developed in order to minimize the training costs and the patients risk and to give new insights into the human anatomy.

We use a haptic device with six degrees of freedom (6DOF) to feedback forces that resist needle insertion and rotation. An improved haptic volume rendering approach is used to calculate the forces. This approach makes use of label data of relevant structures like skin, bone, muscles or fat and original CT data that contributes information about structures that can not be segmented.

A realtime 3D visualization with optional stereo view gives an overview of the punctured region. 2D visualizations of orthogonal slices enable a detailed impression of the anatomical context. The input data consisting of CT and label data and surface models of relevant structures is stored in an XML file together with haptic rendering and visualization parameters. In a first step the Visible Human Male and the Visible Korean Human data sets have been used to generate the virtual bodies.