Sofa Framework : Medical simulation

Sofa Framework is :

an Open Source framework primarily targeted at real-time simulation, with an emphasis on medical simulation.

Sofa framework has many interesting features which make the simulation and creating of models more easier . Sofa comes with example files , you can open them from its example directory . which include , very interesting examples , can be used for start-up if you wanna play around Sofa .

What Sofa can do :

( feature listed at Sofa`s site )

Create complex and evolving simulations by combining new algorithms with existing algorithms
Modify most parameters of the simulation (deformable behavior, surface representation, solver, constraints, collision algorithm, …) by simply editing a XML file
Build complex models from simpler ones using a scene-graph description
Efficiently simulate the dynamics of interacting objects using abstract equation solvers
Reuse and easily compare a variety of available methods
Transparently parallelize complex computations using semantics based on data dependencies
Use new generations of GPUs through the CUDA API to greatly improve computation times

Those features as Sofa nutshell , hopefully , Sofa team will expand those features later .

Saving , Exporting , and Graphs :
Files : Sofa saves the files into *.scn file , which is XML file , can be easily edited by any text-editor . Sofa also can export png image , from the current working file , as well as can record an animation .

Documentation , Manuals & tutorials :

In my installation at ubuntu 9.04 , Help menu is disabled , also most of the Sofa directories are located at ” /usr/share/sofa/ ” also same as recording directory . which i needed to change .
Documentation , manuals , tutorials are available at Sofa site , which is more that rich at the moment . in documentation and manuals not for tutorials .

There are also a set of interesting publications regarding SOFA : which are published in 2007 , 2008 & 2009 . very useful for who are interested in medical simulation .

Projects :
Interesting projects you can found at Sofa`s projects section , which are good examples of Sofa usage .

Note for ubuntu / linux user :
You may need to disable compiz before running SOFA .

Resources :

Sofa`s website ,

Soda`s Wikipedia page ,

Collaborative Development of an open framework for medical simulation – link -

Hamza Emadeen Mousa eyeView_0001