ECiSS: A middleware based development framework for enhancing collaboration in surgical simulation

It is a challenging task to design and implement a high performance collaborative surgical simulation system because of the sharp conflict between the requirement of maintaining high levels of state consistency and the limitation of network transmission capacity. In this paper, a middleware based development platform, termed ECiSS, is presents for enhancing collaboration in surgical simulation. In this framework, efficient collaboration is achieved by developing a series of network management approaches, including services management, collaboration mechanisms, adaptive protocols, various deformation models, 3D to 2D synchronization and flexible computation policies. In addition, middleware based methods are adopted in our design and implementation to facilitate the transformation procedures from standalone simulators to collaborative applications. Prototypes of our framework have been developed for Windows and UNIX platform respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework can support collaborative surgical simulation with acceptable network latencies and has the potential to be used in clinical applications.