Beyond Finite Elements A Comprehensive

Journal of Biomechanics 45 (2012) 2698–2701

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Journal of Biomechanics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbiomech www.JBiomech.com Short communication

Beyond finite elements: A comprehensive, patient-specific neurosurgical simulation utilizing a meshless method
K. Miller n, A. Horton, G.R. Joldes, A. Wittek
Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, Western Australia 6909, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Accepted 27 July 2012

To be useful in clinical (surgical) simulations, a method must use fully nonlinear (both geometric and material) formulations to deal with large (finite) deformations of tissues. The method must produce meaningful results in a short time on consumer hardware and not require significant manual work while discretizing the problem domain. In this paper, we showcase the Meshless Total Lagrangian
Explicit Dynamics Method (MTLED) which meets these requirements, and use it for computing brain deformations during surgery. The problem geometry is based on patient-specific MRI data and includes the parenchyma, tumor, ventricles and skull. Nodes are distributed automatically through the domain rendering the normally difficult problem of creating a patient-specific computational grid a trivial exercise. Integration is performed over a simple, regular background grid which does not need to conform to the geometry boundaries. Appropriate nonlinear material formulation is used. Loading is performed by displacing the parenchyma surface nodes near the craniotomy and a finite frictionless sliding contact is enforced between the skull (rigid) and parenchyma. The meshless simulation results are compared to both intraoperative MRIs and Finite Element Analysis results for multiple 2D sections.
We also calculate Hausdorff distances between the computed deformed surfaces of the ventricles and those observed intraoperatively.

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