Material Properties Identification Mathod of Multilayer Soft Tissue by Image-Processing Assisted Measurements

Abstract

This paper describes a method to identify the material properties of biological soft tissue in vivo, considering nonlinearity in the high strain region, and the multilayered structure whithin which the material properties differ. In this method, deformation of the tissue was measured from MRI images, analyzed using the Finite Element Method, and the material properties optimized. To verify the practical effectiveness of this method, we used a 3-layered rubber column, as, an example. The results show, the accuracy of the identified properties were over 20%, however, while the reproducibility of deformation was approximately 1.2%. We believe higher accuracy can be achived by improving, measurement precision of the form and deformation.