Investigating Effective Parameters in Tactile Determination of Artery included in Soft Tissue by FEM

One of the newest ways of surgery is known as Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), which in spite of its benefits, because of surgeon's tactile sensing omission, causes some problems with detection of arteries and their exact positions in tissue during a surgery. In this study, tactile detection of an artery in tissue has been modeled by finite element method. In this modeling, three 2D models of tissue have been created: tissue, tissue including a tumor, and tissue including an artery. After solving the three models with similar boundary conditions and loadings, the 2D tactile mappings and stress graphs for upper nodes of models, which have the role of transferring tactile data, have been explored. Comparing these results showed that stress graphs of upper nodes of tissue including an artery is time-dependent. However, for two other models it is constant. Then, the effect of variation of different parameters of the model on artery detection such as tissue thickness, artery diameter, and elastic module of artery wall has been studied.