A survey of biomechanical modeling of the brain for intra-surgical displacement estimation and medical simulation

Biomechanical modeling of human and animal brain tissue is a growing field of research, whose applications currently include simulating, with a view to minimizing, head injuries in car impacts, generically modeling dynamic behavior in the surgical theater, such as brain shift, and increasingly, providing medical experts with clinical tools such as surgical simulators and predictive models for tumour growth. This chapter provides an overview of the literature on the biomechanics of the brain, with a particular emphasis on applications to intrasurgical brain shift estimation and to surgical simulation. Included is a discussion of the underlying continua, of numerical estimation techniques, and of related cutting and resection models.