SmartBioSim is a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the National Plan for Research (Society Challenges). The goal of this project is the proposal of a new method based on Computational Intelligence (CI) for real time simulation of the biomechanical behavior of human in-vivo soft tissues and bodies. CI will be used to learn the behavior of those tissues and bodies using the biomechanical parameters obtained from the biomechanical analysis of each individual patient. Therefore, simulations will be patient-tailored, thus with a better accuracy than those based on population models. The use of CI allows a much faster processing since although training might be time-consuming, once models are trained they can simulate the behavior of the tissue/body in real time. Furthermore, many CI models are universal function approximators, i.e, they are able to find general relationships between two given data sets (biomechanical parameters and corresponding behavior, in the case of this project). The proposed methodology will be validated in two case scenarios: the simulation of the mammographic compression during acquisition of X-ray mammograms and the simulation of liver deformation during the breathing process. Both are vital in their respective application areas. The simulation mammographic compression using FEM represents the bottleneck of many processes such as multimodal image registration of breast images or virtual generation of synthetic mammograms. In the case of liver, the simulation of deformation in real time is vital for guiding some liver biopsies and for the implementation of radiotherapy treatment in some liver tumors.
Status: Finished
Start date: 05/01/2013
End date: 12/31/2017