Abstract
The safety of robotic and endoscopic surgeries could be improved if the physical state of organs were evaluated quantitatively during procedures. Although force measurement systems have been investigated, understanding the intraoperative state of an organ remains problematic. We propose a method to reconstruct external forces and the whole deformation field of elastic bodies using local displacement observations. We introduce an L1-norm minimization approach into the finite element analysis to solve the ill-posed problem. Our experiments show that the position and magnitude of the applied force can be reconstructed from 20-30% surface area of the deformed shape.
