Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ADT (Action de Développement Technologique)

Team MIMESIS received a support for the development of the SOFA framework through two ADTs:

• DynMesh (Sep 2015 – Aug 2017): The objectives of the 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.

• ASNAP (Accélération des Simulations Numériques pour l'Assistance Peropératoire, Jan 2017 – Dec 2018). We are partners of ADT ASNAP with principal investigator being Inria team CAMUS. The goal of the project is a significant acceleration of physics-based simulations developed by MIMESIS. The technologies such as Apollo, XFOR, ORWL, developed by team CAMUS are used to optimize the execution of different components of framework SOFA, taking into account the possibilities provided by modern CPUs and GPGPUs. Since team CAMUS is also located in Strasbourg, the project benefits from the geographical location: an engineer Maxim Mogé was recruited, starting from 01/01/2017 and he shares his time between the two teams.

ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche)

MIMESIS participates in the following ANR projects:

• RESET: This project started in March 2015 and will end in May 2017. Its objective is to develop a high-fidelity training system for retinal surgery. Retinal surgery is an increasingly performed procedure for the treatment of a wide spectrum of retinal pathologies. Yet, as most micro-surgical techniques, it requires long training periods before being mastered. This simulator is built upon our scientific expertise in the field of real-time simulation, and our success story for technology transfer in the field of cataract surgery simulation (MSICS simulation developed for the HelpMeSee foundation).

• Coordinator: MIMESIS

• Partners: the InSimo company, the AVR team of the ICube lab.

• EVEREST: The overall objective of the EVEREST project is thus to bring a leap forward in factorization of large sparse tensors in order to improve the accessibility, completeness and reliability of real-world KBs. This line of research could have a huge impact in industry (Semantic Web, biomedical applications, etc.). For that reason, Xerox Research Center Europe is supporting this project and will supply data, provide expertise and ease industrial transfer. This proposal is also consistent with the long-term research direction of its principal partner, Heudiasyc, since it contributes in several aspects of the 10 years LabEx program on Technological Systems of Systems started in 2011.

• Coordinator: IHU Strasbourg

• Partners: Inria, IRCAD, University of Strasbourg, Siemens Healthcare, Karl Storz GmbH., University of Twente

Inria Collaborations

MIMESIS is closely connected to the SOFA Consortium, created by Inria in November 2015 with the objective to support the SOFA community and encourage contributions from new SOFA users. The Consortium should also be a way to better answer to the needs of academic or industrial partners. MIMESIS actively participates at the development of SOFA and contributed to the evolution of the framework. Moreover, MIMESIS also participates in an initiative aiming at verification and validation of codes and algorithms of SOFA.

Further, MIMESIS actively collaborates with the following Inria teams:

• MAGRIT: The team at Inria Grand Est focuses on research in computer vision and is also actively involved in computer-based solutions for the planning or the simulation of interventional radiology procedures, with a strong collaboration with the CHU in Nancy. We collaborate with MAGRIT in the area of interventional radiology and augmented reality. Currently, two PhD thesis are co-supervised by researcher from Magrit: the PhD thesis of Jaime Garcia Guevara and Raffaella Trivisonne.

• CAMUS: The team focuses on developing, adapting and extending automatic parallelizing and optimizing techniques, as well as proof and certification methods, for the efficient use of current and future multi-core processors. Currently, we collaborate with team CAMUS on parallelization of framework SOFA in ADT project ASNAP.

• DEFROST: The team conducts research in soft robotics. We continue mutual interaction with DEFROST mainly in the context of contact modeling.

National Collaborations

At the national level, the MIMESIS team collaborates with:

• The TIMC laboratory(Techniques de l’Ingénierie Médicale et de la Complexité) in Grenoble: this large research group has a strong background in computer-aided surgery, medical imaging, registration, statistical and bio-mechanical modeling. We have regular interactions with various members of this group. We are collaborating with Yohan Payan (DR CNRS) on the modeling and simulation of the brain shift. A common PhD thesis started on that topic in late 2014. Other areas of interest are in the field of advanced soft tissue modeling and computer aided surgery.

• The LML laboratory(Laboratoire de Mécanique de Lille): a French research laboratory (UMR CNRS 8107) part of the Carnot institute ARTS. With more than two hundred researchers, LML focuses on the following research areas: mechanical reliability and Tribology, fluid mechanics, civil engineering and soil mechanics.

• Hôpital Paul-Brousse: a hospital in South Paris. We collaborate with Centre Hépato-Biliaire via the co-supervision of the Ph.D. thesis of Nicolas Golse, MD, who is a surgeon at the center.