Numerical and Experimental Study on Mechanical Properties of Gelatin as Substitute for Brain Tissue

Abstract

The mechanical properties of living tissues have been major subjects of interest in biomechanics. In particular, the characteristics of very soft materials such as the brain have not been fully understood because experiments are often severely limited by ethical guidelines. There are increasing demands for studies on remote medical operations using robots. We conducted compression tests on brain-like specimens made of gelatin to find substitutes with the mechanical properties of brain tissues. Using a finite element analysis, we compared our experimental data with existing data on the brain in order to establish material models for brain tissues. We found that our substitute models for brain tissues effectively simulated their mechanical behaviors.

A study on real-time stress calculation of soft tissues using digital image techniques

“…The significant ingredients of soft tissues are nonlinear elastic, isotropic, incompressible and independent of strain rate. In this section, a procedure of defining a mathematical model for biological tissues based on the phenomenological way is addressed (Bahn and Choi, 2015)…”