Adding new plugins to base Slicer-SOFA

[RafaelPalomar]

🎯 Proposal to Expand Slicer-SOFA Default Plugins

After discussing with @bakpaul , we've identified several SOFA plugins that would greatly enhance Slicer-SOFA out-of-the-box. These plugins introduce advanced modeling capabilities, which can be particularly beneficial for medical simulation scenarios.

🔧 Candidates for Inclusion

1. BeamAdapter (LGPL)

   • Use Case: 📐 Simulation of 1D flexible structures (e.g., catheters).
   • Why It’s Useful: Perfect for minimally invasive procedures, like guidewire simulations in surgical planning and training.

2. Registration (Q License)

   • Use Case: 🎯 Precise registration of models within a scene.
   • Status: ❌ Not included due to licensing constraints.
   • Status: Included as license changed to LGPL.

3. CGALPlugin (GPL)

   • Use Case: 🏗️ Advanced 3D tetrahedral mesh generation for complex geometries.
   • Status: ❌ Not included due to GPL licensing.

4. Shell (LGPL)

   • Use Case: 🐚 Simulation of thin, flexible surfaces with bending rigidity (e.g., organ capsules, metal plates).
   • Why It’s Useful: Enhances realism by reinforcing surface integrity and supporting biomechanical modeling of soft tissues.

⚖️ Licensing Considerations

• Excluded:

  • Registration (Q License)
  • CGALPlugin (GPL)

  These plugins cannot be bundled by default due to their restrictive licenses.

• Included:

  • BeamAdapter (LGPL)
  • Shell (LGPL)

  Both are under LGPL, making them suitable for inclusion and distribution. Their functionalities align well with medical training and research scenarios, especially for simulating catheters and reinforcing organ surfaces.

🚀 Next Steps

• Confirm suitability of BeamAdapter and Shell for inclusion.
• Consider documentation and examples to help users get started.

By incorporating BeamAdapter and Shell into Slicer-SOFA’s default setup, we can enhance the capabilities of Slicer-SOFA, offering more realistic and versatile simulation tools right out of the box.

[lassoan]

Running the simulation in a separate process would prevent the viral license to spread to the Slicer application, which would allow using SOFA in commercial applications with GPL plugins. It is good to have the option of running the simulation in the same process, but it would be useful to be able to run it in a separate process, too.

[lassoan]

In the long term, https://github.com/BrunoLevy/geogram could be used instead of CGAL.

Registration plugin developer could be asked to change the license to permissive. By now he probably realized that the restrictive license does not do him any good (nobody goes to him to buy a commercial license) while it has clear disadvantages. There may be also many registration librariesthat could be used to reimplement a similar plugin with permissive license.

[pieper]

If we can just distribute an wrapper, like we do for ffmpeg, and require the user to download and install the GPL parts then we are safe. But to be on the safe side we can't build/distribute GPL code even if it will be running in a separate process.

[bakpaul]

I agree with @lassoan on the fact that multiprocess execution must still be in sight of every development, simulation by its nature is crash prone and take a lot of computing time. To enhance hte user experience, we need to target such soft.

We are the maintainers of Registration, I'll take a look on what is making it GPL and how to solve this ! Maybe we cans add it too at one point !

[bakpaul]

Here it is : sofa-framework/Registration#18 Registration is now LGPL