Welcome to the SPRING Surgical Simulator Site

What is SPRING?

SPRING is a real-time soft-tissue simulation platform for building and running surgical simulators to be used in medical education of surgeons. The SPRING project is maintained by Stanford University's SUMMIT group and the National Biocomputation Center at Stanford University.

SPRING can be used for:

• Training surgeons
• Building surgery skills
• Surgical rehearsal
• An extensible, open-source platform for developing scenarios and simulations

SPRING is especially intended for training in minimal access surgery in which indirect viewing and manipulation play key roles.

SPRING was developed by Dr. Kevin Montgomery of the National Biocomputation Center. It is supported and maintained by Stanford University's SUMMIT group under the Haptic Audio Visual Network for Education and Training (HAVNet) project.

Open Source SPRING

News: SPRING released on Macintosh OS X

Documentation Update: Doxygen-created view of SPRING

Visit the SPRING SourceForge project page for access to the latest released versions of SPRING code. At this time we have releases for:

• New! Macintosh OS XSPRING application + PhantomServer OMNI
• Window: SPRING application + PhantomServer
• Sun Solaris: SPRING application

Open Source Surgical Simulation Workshops

SPRING and other open source simulation platforms were featured in two recent workshops, attracting developers and surgeons who learned about the state of the art of simulation and freely available platforms for developing applications.

An Open Source Framework workshop was held at MMVR 15 on February 8, 2007, organized by the Simulation Open Framework Architecture (SOFA) group of CIMIT.

On August 28-30, 2006 SUMMIT hosted a hands-on Surgical Simulator Workshop at Stanford University. Check out our recommended reading list for surgical simulation.

Getting Started with SPRING

Documentation

New! We have added Doxygen-created documentation of the SPRING application's code tree.

Tutorials and Examples

The examples and tutorials here will help a user get started using the SPRING system.

Modeling surgery

SPRING employs 3-D models of deformable tissue that include spring-based force computations model model the interactions of tools and simulated tissues, presenting a 3-D world in which students can learn basic surgical skills in a virtual setting. Learn more. 

SPRING models

To learn more about 3-D data formats and how they are used in SPRING, click here.

NEW: Who is looking at SPRING?

SPRING is being used in many locations in the world. We use StatCounter to track views of this website. Click the map to see statistics on people recent access to SPRING's website pages.

SPRING Architecture

SPRING's architecture employs interacting application programs over local and wide-area networks. Written in standard C++, and available on multiple operating systems, SPRING's structure is described here.