Developing a Standardized Tri-Service Medical
Simulation Platform: The TOPS Initiative
Alan Liu, Thomas Talbot, Terry Yoo,
Solomon Sherfey, Eric Acosta, Gilbert Muniz
MMVR 2011
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Alan Liu
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Thomas Talbot
Open source and open standards for medical training systems are a new concept to military medical training software and systems. The Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) is pursuing a strategy to introduce open standards for hardware and open source developer tools with the goal of increasing innovation and competition while simultaneously reducing redundant and repetitive development. It is theorized that implementation of open source tools for physiology, non-player character artificial intelligence, natural language processing, anatomy and haptics, and medical assets will lower barriers to new innovators to pursue more advanced and efficacious medical training.
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Gilbert Muniz
This consortium comprises of key Department of Defense elements involved in guiding the adoption and use of medical simulation within the military. This presentation will discuss the motivation for the formation of the MMSTC, as well as its mission objectives.
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Solomon Sherfey
While diplomacy may open doors to cooperation among humankind, it is standards that build the bridges by which we conduct commerce of all types – intellectual, monetary, commercial, industrial. What are standards? Where do they come from, and how is it that they shape our daily lives? This brief discussion will address the national/regional/international standards organizations and the principles by which they develop and maintain standards.
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Terry Yoo
The Insight Toolkit is an open source software initiative for medical image analysis. This project has been executed by a geographically distributed consortium, and this international coalition has developed not only the image processing API, but also the necessary software engineering tools and infrastructure to support multiple platforms, a broad cross-section of compilers, and a variety of operating systems and programming languages. The success of this program is constantly being assessed, but the spread of ITK among international research laboratories and its incorporation as part of the software foundation of organizations such as the Allen Brain Institute and National Alliance for Medical Image Computing are strong indications of them impact that ITK is having on the community.
The nature of projects such as ITK is to create a scientific rendezvous, a body of knowledge over which research groups can share and collaborate in their chosen fields and on their chosen applications. These efforts are enabled as often as not by the support of conventions as much as by promoting standards. Computer scientists communicate with one another through software source code rather than peer-review publication, and promoting communication and collaboration is our emphasis.
Over the past year, NLM has undertaken to revise and update ITK. Using funds provided through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, we are reworking ITK to better employ current computer hardware systems with their multiple cores and advanced graphics processing units capable of general purpose computation. Our anticipated scope of application domains has widened through our experience with biologists to include microscopy, diffusion tensor imaging, and other areas relevant to the neurosciences.
This presentation will cover the motivating principles behind ITK. I will enumerate some examples of successful scientific rendezvous as well as a number of engineering rendezvous and standards. I will also discuses the organization and management of an ongoing research and development project such as ITK and the current state of this effort.
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Eric Acosta
We present a novel pipeline architecture to develop Virtual Environments for multicore CPU systems. The architecture is shown to be efficient and scalable across the current range of multicore processors. Near linear speed-ups have been observed in experiments involving hundreds of objects on a six-core i7 CPU. We also demonstrate that sophisticated VEs for medical simulation can be efficiently described and visualized using the architecture.
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Alan Liu
The Tri-service Open Platform for Simulation is an effort to develop a common base hardware architecture for medical simulation. TOPS will be adopted by the MMSTC as a standard platform. TOPS will support multiple medical training applications through the use of hardware and software extensions. This presentation will highlight the motivation for the TOPS initiative. End-user goals for this platform will be discussed. The development timetable will be outlined, and plans for involving academic and commercial partners will be put forth for discussion.
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