A Force-Sensor-Less Approach for Rapid Young’s Modulus Identification of Heterogeneous Soft Tissue

Due to individual differences, accurate identification of tissue elastic parameters is essential for biomechanical modeling in surgical guidance for hepatic venous injections. This paper aims to acquire the absolute Young’s modulus of heterogeneous soft tissues during endoscopic surgery with two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound images. First, we introduced a force-sensor-less approach that utilizes a precalibrated soft patch with a known Young’s modulus and its ultrasound images to calculate the external forces exerted by the probe on the tissue. Second, we introduced a Kriging-based inverse algorithm to identify the relative Young’s modulus (RYM) between the inclusion and the background tissue. The RYM was estimated based on 2D plane strain approximation and mapped to the RYM of three-dimensional (3D) soft tissue through a trained Kriging model. Finally, we developed a direct method to identify the background Young’s modulus (BYM) based on calculated external forces and RYM. The simulation results demonstrate the high efficiency and robustness of the Kriging-based inverse algorithm in identifying RYM. Physical experiments on the three phantoms show that the errors of the identified BYM and RYM are all below 15%. The proposed methodology for Young’s modulus identification is feasible and achieves satisfactory accuracy and computational efficiency in both simulations and physical experiments.