Question About Tissue Deformation in 3D Slicer

[vincenzocivale]

First of all, congratulations on your impressive work on the Sofa.IGTLink plugin! It’s an excellent project, and I truly appreciate the effort you’ve put into bridging SOFA with 3D Slicer. It’s a significant contribution to the field of interactive simulations.

I’ve been exploring your plugin and wanted to ask for clarification on a specific aspect of the workflow. If I understand correctly, in the context of simulating tissue deformation in 3D Slicer:

1. The input forces or constraints are sent from 3D Slicer to SOFA using IGTLINK.
2. SOFA computes the deformation using its simulation models and generates updated meshes at each simulation step.
3. These deformed meshes are then sent back to 3D Slicer as "frames" for visualization in real time.

Is this understanding accurate? If not, could you kindly explain how the deformation simulation and visualization flow is handled between SOFA and 3D Slicer?

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your response.

Best regards,

[bakpaul]

HEllo !

I am sorry for the response time, I didn't get a notification...
This is correct for the two first points. Know that the data that is sent could be anything, from a force to a poisition, a mesh and so on... For instance the example scenes in this plugin show the interaction capability of the plugin, you can impose a position of the object by picking it in the sender and the reciever will follow it.

For the third point, I don't know what do you mean by frame. But no rendering is needed on the SOFA side, the simulation will send back the position of the nodes of the object. Thos position are then used by slicer to update the models and then re-render the mesh. This has many advantages, for instance it could be used to compute a displacement ifeld that can be applied to a medical image.

Hope that answered your questions !

[vincenzocivale]

Hi,

Thank you again for your previous response. I have some further questions regarding the mechanism for computing the deformed points and how they are communicated to 3D Slicer. Specifically, I'm trying to understand how the deformed points are calculated efficiently within SOFA and how this data (e.g., the updated node positions) is transmitted and integrated into 3D Slicer to update the model.

I've been considering several strategies, but I haven't yet identified an optimal approach that balances computational efficiency and accuracy during the communication phase. Could you provide more details on the process implemented in the plugin?