Evaluation based on the gradient method of the elastic properties of human tissues in vivo

Nowadays the computational simulation of the mechanical behaviour of human tissues in the medical context is a field which has aroused a great interest in the scientific community. The study of the behaviour of those tissues carries a great difficulty, in part, due to the fact that the behaviour of those tissues is different from one patient to another and, in general, it is no possible to make empirical experiments with the tissue to determine its elastic properties. In order to circumvent this issue, in this work we propose a method to evaluate these properties assuming a Mooney-Rivlin constitutive model. The proposed method is based on the information provided by medical images and two different deformation states of the organ and, by using a gradient-based optimization process we accurately obtain the elastic properties of the constitutive model. The numerical experiments show the validity of the method for the example used.