A Surgical Simulation System Supporting COLLADA-Based File Format

This paper proposes a surgical simulation system that supports a COLLADA file format, which is a XML based 3D model data format and also proposes its extended file format to represent various information useful for the surgical simulation, i.e., several parameters for a spring model of the skin or the internal organs used as a haptic device parameters and several text-based data used as annotations for helping a surgical operator. The system provides the user with intuitive operations such as cutting and sewing operations in a virtual 3D space using a force-feedback device, Phantom. A lot of surgical simulation systems supporting a force-feedback device like Phantom have been proposed so far. In this paper, the authors propose not only a surgical simulation system supporting a haptic device, Phantom, but also an extended COLLADA file format. The proposed file format can include various additional data besides 3D model data. This paper introduces the proposed COLLADA-based file format and clarifies it is useful for surgical simulators by showing actual examples using the proposed surgical simulation system.