Indentation experiments on viscoelastic gel material for validating medical simulations

The modeling of deformation behavior of soft tissues under known boundary conditions and forces is fruitful research in engineering and biomedical area that is found in various applications such as virtual surgery, blood flow simulation, implant operations etc. Accurate modeling of this tissue deformation behaviour is proportional to the mathematical power of the proposed model and the accurate determination of the material coefficients that are used in the model to feature material properties. Verification of each newly proposed method, model and coefficients, thus, displaying the advantages and disadvantages is an important necessity. Laboratory experiments which are done on artificial materials, when their isotropic and homogenous structures and the advantage to be able to repeat the experiments under the constant conditions such as same load and same boundary are considered, will contribute to the development of some physical standards for the verification process of the proposed models. In this study, the results of an indentation experiment made on an viscoelastic silicon material of which material properties are very close to that of human liver are presented. These results make the data that can be used to confirm the results gathered from the applications of the related area such as real-time virtual surgery simulators, finite element or mass-spring system models, providing the fact that the experiments display the exact behaviour of the structure that has invariable geometry and boundary conditions.