MedicalStudio: a medical component-based framework Daniela G. Trevisan 1,2 , Vincent Nicolas 1 , Benoit Macq 1 , Luciana P. Nedel 2 1 Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory, Université catholique de Louvain, (UCL) Place du Levant 2, Bat. Stevin, 1348 Louvain-le-Neuve, Belgium 2 Instituto de Informática – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) Caixa Postal 15.064 – 91.501-970 – Porto Alegre – RS – Brazil {trevisan, vincent.nicolas, macq}@tele.ucl.ac.be, nedel@inf.ufrgs.br Abstract. This paper introduces MedicalStudio: a composable, open-source easily evolvable cross-platform framework that supports surgical planning and intra-operative guidance with augmented interactions. It is designed to integrate the whole computer aided surgery process to which both researchers and clinicians participate. In this paper we provide a description of the framework architecture as well as some medical components and applications already developed into this framework. Collaboration with several research centers and medical clinics has shown the versatility and promising dissemination of this medical framework. 1. Introduction Advances in scanning technology and other data collection systems provides a wide spectrum of useful and complementary information about a patient’s status to research and clinical domains. To combine these different types of information into a coherent presentation assuring usable and cognitively adequate interaction within the Operating Room becomes extremely difficult. More sophisticated methods of analysis, guidance and interaction need to be created to achieve these objectives. Concerning some of the existents systems for surgical planning and intraoperative guidance, 3D Slicer [Gering, et al 1999] has been one of the first open-source application enabling data fusion and interventional imaging. Julius [Keeve, et al 2001] is another extensible, cross-platform software framework providing a complete medical processing pipeline, but more targeted to visualization and analysis, whereas IGSTK [Cleary, et al 2004] is the latest framework currently under development for open- source component-based rapid prototyping of image guided surgery applications. Research efforts in Image Guided Surgery (IGS) systems and image processing are investigating how to leverage on such techniques to develop more effective, integrated solutions for the planning, simulation, and finally intra-operative guidance systems either based on a navigation concept or including human-computer interaction systems. As pointed out in [Cleary, Chung and Mun 2004], other problems regarding the use of new technologies are the lack of compatible and interchangeable equipments and limited communication among surgeons and others in the team especially during surgical procedures.