Experimental creep behavior of porcine liver under indentation with laparoscopic grasper for MIS applications

Mechanical response of soft tissues behaved disparate due to fast and large deformation during surgical grasping, so there is a need for experimental databases of biomechanical characteristics of soft tissue under the contact of MIS tool, which are more useful for designing new surgical instruments, training inexperienced surgeons, improving surgical simulations and developing surgical robotics system. A novel indentation test to simulate the real-time surgical operation condition was present in this paper. The creep behavior of porcine liver in vitro was studied under uniaxial indentation by using MIS grasper. The nominal stress between the grasper and the liver was 0.02 to 0.1 MPa, the loading velocity was 1 to 3 mm/s, and the holding time was 300 s to simulate clamping tissue operation. Results showed that the creep process of the liver during 300 s of duration can be divided into three stages: loading stage I, transition creep stage II and steady creep stage III. The creep characteristic of liver behaves time-dependent, load-dependent and strongly loading velocity-dependent due to its nonlinear viscoelastic characteristics and hysteresis characteristics. These creep behavior might also be associated with the deformation, migration and biochemical reaction of the liver cells. The phenomenological model derived in this paper may describe the creep behavior of the liver. The results would provide experimental databases and phenomenological models for investigating biomechanical characteristics of soft tissue under the contact of MIS tool.