This year, I was awarded the Fusion Investment Funding which sponsored me and my research team to establish the collaboration between National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA, BU) and Simulation & Electronic Animation Lab (SEALAB, the University of Utah). The purpose of this collaboration is to publish high quality papers, exchange innovative ideas and explore the potential of improvement and commercialization of our surgery simulator.
Throughout the year, the collaboration progressed smoothly and obtained significant results. We kept in touch regularly with our partners, shared various interesting and inspiring ideas on the topic of physically based soft tissue simulation, collision detection and the development of surgery simulator. Inspired by the insightful discussion with our partners, we have published two journal papers and two conference papers. My PhD student Kun Qian, as the main participant of this project, has benefited a lot from it. His work was awarded the winner of British Computer Society Animation and Games Development 2016 Competition. We have also exchanged ideas on funding application, teaching and research team management. The most impressing experience was the attending of their internal computer graphic research seminars which aims to promote the idea exchange and potential cooperation between different research groups. It is quite useful for us to improve the efficiency and quality of the similar seminar we held at BU. Besides SEALAB, we also visited the world leading medical visualization research group of the University of Utah: Scientific Centre of Visualization (SCI) and University of Utah Medical Centre. Those two organizations demonstrated the state of art of medical visualization and simulation, provided practical and valuable suggestion on the future direction of surgery simulator.
Although this fusion project finished, our collaboration has never stopped. We are continuing working on the topic of biomechanical based soft tissue simulation and exploring potential opportunities for joint research funding application. The following are selections of some pictures of the beautiful view of the state of Utah, main campus of University of Utah and the award we achieved.
Dr. Xiaosong Yang
National Centre for Computer Animation, Faculty of Media and Communication
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