| Summary: | The characterisation of the mechanical properties of biological soft tissues
is of great interest for many applications in the bioengineering field:
such as for the detection of tumours and diseases, for the development
of medical assistive and surgical technologies. These technologies include
surgery simulation, which based on computational methods, reproduces
surgical procedures in order to develop the skills of the surgeon, to plan
operations or to provide technical support to surgeon during the operation.
However, modelling the physical behaviour of human organs and tissues
remains a challenge. This is due to the difficulty in characterising the
physical properties of biological soft tissues. Besides, the challenge lies on the
computation time requirements for real-time simulations. Surgical real-time
simulation should employ a sufficiently precise and simple model in order to
provide a realistic tactile and visual feedback.
To address these difficulties, this thesis presents a methodology for the
characterisation and modelling of the mechanical properties of soft tissues,
for its integration into real-time surgical simulators. The characterisation
is performed in the laboratory using a parallel plate rheometer. The
methodology has been applied to synthetic materials such as agar gel, as
well as to biological tissues such as porcine brain tissue. By performing
this characterisation, different mathematical models have been analysed and developed for the modelling of the selected tissues. These models have been
studied in order to select the most appropriate one, depending on the specific
requirements of the simulator.
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