Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ADT (Action de Développement Technologique)

Team MIMESIS received a support for the development of the project LOSAR: Liver Open Surgery with Augmented Reality that aims at developing tools for a per-operative usage of research algorithms developed in the team. Although the current trend is to move towards minimally invasive surgery, open-liver surgery remains the standard treatment for most patients. For Augmented reality purpose, open surgery raises specific constraints compared to celioscopic surgery, such as larger deformations of the liver and unavoidable occlusions of the organ. During the year 2017, the Mimesis team has developed an augmented reality prototype for open liver surgery. This prototype was developed as part of research projects and a collaboration between the team Mimesis and the CHB Paul Brousse (first service of hepatobiliary surgery in France).

Our goal is to be able to repeatedly test our method for one or more important publications in medical conferences. This type of publication requires to methodically repeat our solution on several patients. However, the steps are still insufficiently automated and the algorithm needs to be improved for greater reliability. These essential elements lie outside traditional research missions and require significant development and engineering effort. Indeed, an effort of automation and ergonomics will have to be made to make the use of the software sufficiently simple to be used in the operating room. Furthermore, the accuracy of the deformed model (anatomical distances modeled versus actual anatomical relationships) must also be verified and validated through experimentation.

ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche)

MIMESIS coordinates the ANR project entitled SPERRY: SuPervisEd Robotic suRgerY - application to needle insertion. Percutaneous medical procedures (using surgical needles) are among the least invasive approaches to accessing deep internal structures of organs without damaging surrounding tissues. Today, many surgical procedures rely on the use of needles allowing for complex interventions such as curie-therapies or thermoablations of tumors (cryoablation, radio frequencies). Unlike traditional open surgery, these approaches only affect a localized area around the needle reducing this way trauma and risks of complications. These treatments also offer new solutions for tumors or for metastases for which traditional methods may be contraindicated due to the age of the patient and the extent or location of the disease. Although they provide very good results, these interventions significantly increase the level of expertise required for practitioners.

In this project, we want to develop new solutions for the control of medical robots interacting with soft tissues. This work is motivated by recent advances in the field of medical simulation achieving a sufficient level of realism to help surgeons during the operation. These simulations are now used for training of surgeons, and even for visual assistance during the operation thanks to augmented reality. The maturity of these techniques now suggests the ability to use a simulation intraoperatively to control the motion of a robotic system for needle insertion. This is really a challenge, because in general, very few information can be extracted in real time from images during an intervention. We believe that even minimal knowledge of the mechanical behavior of structures, associated with the use of images can make it possible and allow a robot to reach a pre-identified target during a planning stage, without human intervention.

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.

• 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.