The Simulation of Elastic Tissues in Virtual Medicine Using Neuro- Fuzzy Systems

To improve the benefit of surgical simulators for education and research a visual convincing modeling of the operation scenario and the involved tissues is not sufficient. It is also necessary to simulate the deformation and resulting inner forces of tissue under influence of external forces caused by, for example, medical instruments or gravity. In this paper, we present a hybrid neuro-fuzzy system, which was designed for the description and simulation of tissues. The neuro-fuzzy system can be used to simulate the physical behavior like stiffness, viscosity and inertia of deformable or elastic tissues in surgical simulation. The parameters of a physical model or prior expert knowledge in the form of linguistic terms can be used to initialize the network parameters. Using a neural network structure, local changes to the system like cuts or ruptures can be performed during simulation. As an application example, some simulation results in the area of gynaecological laparoscopy are given.