Concentration-Specific Constitutive Modeling of Gelatin Based on Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Gelatin phantoms are frequently used in the development of surgical devices and medical imaging techniques. They exhibit mechanical properties similar to soft biological tissues [1] but can be handled at a much lower cost. Moreover, they enable a better reproducibility of experiments. Accurate constitutive models for gelatin are therefore of great interest for biomedical engineering. In particular it is important to capture the dependence of mechanical properties of gelatin on its concentration. Herein we propose a simple machine learning approach to this end. It uses artificial neural networks (ANN) for learning from indentation data the relation between the concentration of ballistic gelatin and the resulting mechanical properties.