Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire de Strasbourg

Our team has been selected to be part of the IHU of Strasbourg. This institute is a very strong innovative project of research dedicated to future surgery of the abdomen. It is dedicated to minimally invasive surgery, guided by image and simulation. Based on interdisciplinary expertise of academic partners and strong industry partnerships, the IHU aims at involving several specialized groups for doing research and developments towards hybrid surgery (gesture of the surgeon and simulation-based guidance). The MIMESIS team is an important part of the project. Since September 2011, we develop numerous experimental activities in close collaboration with clinicians.

Other research teams

At the regional level, the MIMESIS team also collaborates with:

• Inria Magrit team: we closely collaborate with the Magrit team on the use of augmented reality in surgical procedures, through the PhD thesis of Jaime Garcia Guevara and the postdoctoral position of Nazim Haouchine. This collaboratin leads to many publications [14].

• ICube Automatique Vision et Robotique (AVR) team: we are currently working with the medical robotics team on percutaneous procedures, in particular robotized needle insertion (with Prof. Bernard Bayle), and needle tracking in medical images (with Elodie Breton). We are also collaborating with Jonathan Vappou on elastography.

• ICube Informatique Géométrique et Graphqiue (IGG) team: the Mimesis team joined the IGG team and develops collaboration in the domain of dynamic topologies, mainly through the use of the CGoGN framework. CGoGN is a C++ library for the manipulation of meshes. It implements combinatorial maps and their multiresolution extensions and has been used in various high level application like the simulation of crowds of autonomous agents and the simulation of cuts, tears and fractures in the context of surgical simulations.

• Nouvel Hopital Civil, Strasbourg: since 2014 we have been working with Prof. David Gaucher, an ophthalmologist surgeon, expert in retina surgery. This led to the submission of the ANR project RESET which started in March 2015. We also collaborate with Prof. Patrick Pessaux, a surgeon who helps us in the context of the SOFA-OR project.

ADT: Aide au Développement Technologique

The MIMESIS receives support for the development of the SOFA framework through two ADT:

• SofaOR (Jan 2015-Dec 2016): The objective of this ADT was twofold: first, we aimed at achieving a level of quality and robustness compatible with IEC 62304 for the core of SOFA and a reduced set of components. This does not include the certification of the code itself, but rather the implementation of a comprehensive development process that will enable the certification by companies wishing to integrate this code into their systems. The second objective was to add new features specific to the needs of using intra-operative guiding tools: interoperability with equipment from the operating room, acquisition and real-time processing of full HD video streams, data assimilation and predictive filters, path planning, visualization for augmented reality, or user interfaces dedicated to the operating room.

• DynMesh (Sep 2015-Aug 2017): The objectives of this ADT was the coupling of SOFA, the physical simulation platform supported by Inria, and CGoGN, the mesh management library developed within the ICube lab at Strasbourg. The goal is to extend the physical engine SOFA with the topological kernel of CGoGN that supports a wide variety of mesh and many local remeshing operations. The coupling of both software libraries will provide users of physical engines with new tools for the development of simulations involving topological changes like cutting, fracturing, adaptation of the resolution or improving contact management or collision detection. The impacts are numerous and will be operated directly within the MIMESIS Team, with our partners or through the establishment of new collaborations.