A viscoelastic soft tissue model for haptic surgical simulation

Brain surgeons distinguish tumors from healthy tissue by the way the tissue deforms. Accurately simulating these deformations at haptic update rates is still a challenge. Biological tissues exhibit complex viscoelastic behavior and undergo large deformation during surgery. For this purpose we evaluate the accuracy and computational performance of the Christensen viscoelastic material model in combination with non-linear finite elements. Our results show that realistic viscoelastic properties of brain tissue can be simulated with haptic feedback at 70% of the update rate of the non-viscoelastic large deformation Neo-Hookean model