There are three main themes in my current research.
1) Medical simulation, both predictive and interactive, which entails anatomy and therapy modeling, with an emphasis on neuro- and orthopedic surgery, and recently, a new project in geriatric medicine.

  • Anatomical modeling builds on deformable surface models and digital atlases; therapy models exploit collaborations and open-source software such as SOFA.
  • I am increasingly pursuing applications of multi-surface musculoskeletal models, such as to personalize OpenSim-based simulation of gait & orthopedic surgery.

2) Surgery planning; any anatomical modeling techniques used in simulation can also apply to planning and navigation in the OR.
3) Potentiation of surgical robotics through 1) and 2) , such as e.g.: soft-tissue tracking for accurate robotic therapy delivery, including robotic deep-brain stimulation (DBS).

I have a broad-based expertise in medical image analysis, including

  • segmentation & pattern recognition;
  • surface and contour models- level sets, simplex incl. multi-surface variants;
  • registration: volumes, points, anatomic slices, 2d-3d and surfaces;
  • surface and volume meshing, decimation;
  • calibration;
  • physical phantoms (PVA-C);
  • range-sensing (which I introduced to medical imaging community);
  • stereo vision.

I also have expertise in visualization and in computational geometry, as well as continuum mechanics, finite elements, haptics and robotics. My clinical exposure includes neuro, ENT, orthopedic, cardiac and transplant surgery as well as geriatric medicine. I am interested in neuroactivation simulation with applications to deep-brain stimulation, including closed-loop neurostimulation models.

I emphasize the use of open-source and contributed software as well as open data repositories.

Open-source and public software tools:

  • SOFA (INRIA): interactive surgery simulation – www.sofa-framework.org .
  • OpenSim (Stanford): musculoskeletal simulation – simtk.org/projects/opensim .
  • ITK (Kitware+): medical image analysis – www.itk.org .
  • CGAL (INRIA+): computational geometry – www.cgal.org .
  • TheVirtualBrain (Univ. Aix-Marseille): neuroactivation simulation – thevirtualbrain.org .
  • Protégé (Stanford): medical ontologies tool.

Contributed source code:

  • 2-Simplex multi-surface deformable models (Benjamin Gilles).