In-vivo measurement of the human soft tissues constitutive laws. Applications to Computer Aided Surgery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel aspiration device designed for intra-operative measurement of human soft tissues' constitutive laws, enabling patient-specific modeling for improved computer-aided surgical procedures.

Contribution

It presents a new sterilizable aspiration device that allows in vivo characterization of soft tissues' mechanical properties during surgery.

Findings

Device successfully measures tissue properties intra-operatively

Enables real-time, patient-specific tissue modeling

Facilitates faster, more accurate surgical simulations

Abstract

In the 80's, biomechanicians were asked to work on Computer Aided Surgery applications since orthopaedic surgeons were looking for numerical tools able to predict risks of fractures. More recently, biomechanicians started to address soft tissues arguing that most of the human body is made of such tissues that can move as well as deform during surgical gestures [1]. An intra-operative use of a continuous Finite Element (FE) Model of a given tissue mainly faces two problems: (1) the numerical simulations have to be "interactive", i.e. sufficiently fast to provide results during surgery (which can be a strong issue in the context of hyperelastic models for example) and (2) during the intervention, the surgeon needs a device that can be used to provide to the model an estimation of the patient-specific constitutive behaviour of the soft tissues. This work proposes an answer to the second point, with the design of a new aspiration device aiming at characterizing the in vivo constitutive laws of human soft tissues. The device was defined in order to permit sterilization as well an easy intra-operative use.