Characterisation of soft materials for effects of viscoelastic behaviour and interaction with surgical instruments

Abstract

The medical field is evolving every day in order to improve treatments and operations. This is why the surgical planning is an important step to decrease mortality and enhance the quality of treatment. The 3D printing of phantoms is a solution for education either for the surgeons or the patients. However, to build them as realistic as possible, several steps have to be followed and in particular the choice of materials. In this paper, several organs as well as polymers will be investigated thanks to shore hardness trials as well as dynamical mechanical analysis. Knowing the diversity of materials, six soft organs that are the heart, the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, the kidney and the brain, will be tested as well as eight polymers classified between the hydrogels : GelMa 3%, the phytagel 1 and 2%, the silicones : the Elkem silicon, the Ecoflex silicon, the PDMS and two blends : PVA 6%wt and PHY 1% undergoing one or two cycle of freezing. The results are trivial as more trials are definitely needed but an interesting investigation between the pancreas and the phytagel is described and should definitely be the interest of future investigations. The conclusions reached are too inconclusive to reach a report fully consistent. In order to improve the results more experiments are needed as well as materials. It is a long-term work that would need future investigations.