Predicting the consequences of tongue cancer surgery: design of a 3D patient-specific biomechanical model and evaluation

The preoperative prediction of the consequences of tongue cancer surgery on tongue mobility is a topic of paramount interest for maxillo-facial surgeons. Loss of tongue mobility is associated with an impairment of basic functions such as speech articulation and deglutition which can, in some cases, induce a substantial decrease in the quality of life of patients. Significant variability has been observed across patients in the recovery of these functions, which are linked with tumor location and reconstruction techniques, but also, strongly, with patient-specific characteristics, such as vocal-tract morphology and idiosyncratic motor control strategies and which call for the development of tools to predict the functional consequences of tongue cancer surgery.Recent advances in our group on the development of a three-dimensional (3D) finite-element biomechanical model of the oral cavity and on the design of automatic adaptation of finite-element meshes to subject-specific morphology constitute encouraging steps towards the development of pre-operative planning tongue surgery systems. Building upon this work, our objective is to perform a clinical evaluation of the proposed biomechanical model by comparing between the acoustic signal predicted by our model after tongue cancer surgery and the acoustic data collected in post-surgery conditions. In the present work, we focus on the design of a 3D patient-specific biomechanical model.