Biomechanical modeling of brain soft tissues for medical applications

Fanny Morin (1, 2) , Matthieu Chabanas (2) , Hadrien Courtecuisse (1) , Yohan Payan (2)

1 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie
2 TIMC-IMAG-GMCAO - Gestes Medico-chirurgicaux Assistés par Ordinateur

For more than 60 years, many works have focused on the determination of the brain biomechanical properties. While the highly nonlinear behavior of the organ, as well as the very low soft tissues stiffness, are stressed, no consensus is universally accepted. Variations in the reported constitutive laws and parameters may be due to the diversity of the experimental protocols and to patient peculiarities. In addition to these rheological properties, boundary conditions are important. Especially, a low sensitivity of the model to these properties is observed when loads are imposed through displacements. For this reason and/or due to the small displacements observed and execution time requirements, most finite element brain models are simulated based on linear elastic law. Nevertheless, models with various boundary conditions have been proposed in the literature, being carefully designed for specific medical applications. A survey about brain soft tissue biomechanical modeling is presented in this chapter. The main works are then presented before describing a new vessel-based brain-shift compensation model using intraoperative Doppler ultrasound imaging.

Mots clés: Brain; Finite element modeling; Biomechanical properties; Constitutive laws; Boundary conditions; Medical simulation

Domaines: Biomécanique [physics.med-ph]; Modélisation et simulation

Fanny Morin, Matthieu Chabanas, Hadrien Courtecuisse, Yohan Payan. Biomechanical modeling of brain soft tissues for medical applications. Payan, Yohan; Ohayon, Jacques. Biomechanics of Living Organs, Academic Press, pp.127-146, 2017, ⟨10.1016/B978-0-12-804009-6.00006-7⟩. ⟨hal-01560109⟩