A biomechanical model for soft tissue simulation in craniofacial surgery

Soft tissue prediction is an important additional criterion in surgical planning. Especially in craniofacial surgery the realistic prediction of a patient's postoperative appearance is of utmost importance. A physically based modeling approach seems to be most suitable for the achievement of realistic results. However the properties of biological structures are highly complex and scarcely investigated, thus simplified models are often applied. In this paper we describe our FE based modeling approach for static soft tissue prediction and muscle muscle simulation.