A NEW PARAMETER ESTIMATION METHOD FOR ONLINE SOFT TISSUE CHARACTERIZATION

Abstract

Dynamic soft tissue characterization is of importance to robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery. The traditional linear regression method is unsuited to handle the non-linear Hunt–Crossley (HC) model and its linearization process involves a linearization error. This paper presents a new non-linear estimation method for dynamic characterization of mechanical properties of soft tissues. In order to deal with non-linear and dynamic conditions involved in soft tissue characterization, this method improves the non-linearity and dynamics of the HC model by treating parameter [Formula: see text] as independent variable. Based on this, an unscented Kalman filter is developed for online estimation of soft tissue parameters. Simulations and comparison analysis demonstrate that the proposed method is able to estimate mechanical parameters for both homogeneous tissues and heterogeneous and multi-layer tissues, and the achieved performance is much better than that of the linear regression method.