Methodology based on genetic heuristics for in-vivo characterizing the patient-specific biomechanical behavior of the breast tissues.
This paper presents a novel methodology toin-vivoestimate the elastic constants of a constitutive model proposed to characterize the mechanical behavior of the breast tissues. An iterative search algorithm based on genetic heuristics was constructed toin-vivoestimate these parameters using only medical images, thus avoiding invasive measurements of the mechanical response of the breast tissues. For the first time, a combination of overlap and distance coefficients were used for the evaluation of the similarity between a deformed MRI of the breast and a simulation of that deformation. The methodology was validated using breast software phantoms for virtual clinical trials, compressed to mimic MRI-guided biopsies. The biomechanical model chosen to characterize the breast tissues was an anisotropic neo-Hookean hyperelastic model. Results from this analysis showed that the algorithm is able to find the elastic constants of the constitutive equations of the proposed model with a mean relative error of about 10%. Furthermore, the overlap between the reference deformation and the simulated deformation was of around 95% showing the good performance of the proposed methodology. This methodology can be easily extended to characterize the real biomechanical behavior of the breast tissues, which means a great novelty in the field of the simulation of the breast behavior for applications such as surgical planing, surgical guidance or cancer diagnosis. This reveals the impact and relevance of the presented work.
LabHuman, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain.
M A
MA
Lago
Departamento de Ingeniería Mecánica Y Construcción, Universitat Jaume I, Av. de Vicent Sos Baynat, s/n 12071 Castelló de la Plana, Spain.
M J
MJ
Rúperez
LabHuman, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain.
F
F
Martínez-Martínez
LabHuman, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain.
S
S
Martínez-Sanchis
Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, 1 Silverstein Building, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
P R
PR
Bakic
LabHuman, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain.
C
C
Monserrat
breast biomechanical modeling; genetic heuristics; in-vivo tissue characterization; parameter estimation