Collaborative simulation of soft-tissue deformation for virtual surgery applications.

A key challenge of collaborative surgical simulation is to maintain a high level of state consistency among the distributed users under the limitation of network transmission capacity. In this paper, a framework integrating a scalable deformable model and an extensible communication protocol is proposed to meet this challenge. The parameters of the deformable model are obtained by making reference to the biomechanical properties of human soft tissues. Efficient collaboration is achieved by developing the communication protocol and implementing a series of network management approaches, including service management, computation policies, coupling control, token control and availability mechanism. A prototype has been developed by using the client-server network architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework can support collaborative surgical simulation with acceptable network latencies.