Identification of Young’s modulus and equivalent spring constraint boundary conditions of the soft tissue with locally observed displacements for endoscopic liver surgery

In endoscopic surgery, the surgical navigation system needs to calculate the deformation of soft tissue by biomechanical model which requires elastic properties and boundary conditions. However, patient-specific elastic parameters and boundary conditions of soft tissue are hard to measure accurately from the preoperative images, especially the boundary conditions will change during the operation due to the ligament cutting. In addition, simple boundary conditions such as fixed constraints and free-force constraints are not physically adequate to simulate the elastic effect of ligaments attached to the liver. In this paper, we present a novel method to identify the Young’s modulus and equivalent spring constraint boundary conditions of a locally observed soft tissue. Based on the spring constraint boundary condition, a two-step inverse algorithm is developed based on the finite element method (FEM) with integration of energy regularized Gauss-Newton (GN) method and l1-regularized method, which takes external forces and displacements of observable nodes as inputs. A series of numerical simulations and physical hydrogel phantom experiments were conducted. The results of simulation and physical experiments show that the Young’s modulus and equivalent spring constraint boundary conditions identified by the proposed method agree well with their setup true values.