"I Can Feel It Coming in the Hairs Tonight": Characterising Mid-Air Haptics on the Hairy Parts of the Skin.

Ultrasound mid-air haptics has received much attention from both academic and industrial groups, however, such investigations have almost exclusively focused on the tactile stimulation of glabrous (hairless) skin of our hands. Meanwhile, the non-glabrous (hairy) part of the skin covers the largest area of our body, yet remains largely untouched and unexplored by this haptic technology. 1) We study acoustic streaming and the 2) acoustic radiation force associated with a mid-air haptic stimulus. 3) We characterise the perceived strength, temperature, and definition of the stimulus through a user study. 4) Finally, in a second user study we explore the possibility of conveying affective (pleasant) touch. These objective and subjective experiments provide the first deep understanding of how mid-air haptics can affect tactile perception through stimulating the hairy skin. To that end, we discuss how researchers and haptic designers can leverage mid-air haptic technology to vary the perceived touch intensity, temperature, and deliver affective touch.

Development of 2D+T tracking algorithm in ultrasound images for radiotherapy.

The aim of this study is to develop and validate a deformable tracking algorithm for monitoring the motion of the target volume on 2D ultrasound (US) images during a radiotherapy fraction. The proposed method is applied on images acquired with a transperineal ultrasound (TP-US) probe on 31 treatment patient's sessions, treated with a prostate or after a surgery, called a prostatectomy. The developed algorithm is based on Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) to find and match the corresponding salient points in the reference and moving images, and Thin Plate Spline (TPS) to warp the image. The results are promising and show that the proposed algorithm performs well with either artificial transforms, or in comparison with a rigid intensity based algorithm used in clinic.