Finite Element Modeling of Spleen Tissue to Analyze Its Interaction With a Laparoscopic Surgery Instrument

Laparoscopic surgery is a Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) procedure which is performed in the abdominal cavity. In this paper, the spleen tissue and a laparoscopic surgical grasper were modeled using ABAQUS software to investigate the tool-tissue interaction, considering large deformations for the spleen tissue. The spleen tissue was modeled as a hyper-elastic material. The laparoscopic grasper includes three gripping jaws that always remain parallel. The sliding can occur between the gripping jaws and the spleen tissue. It was found that the relationship between the pinch forces and push forces keeps its linearity in different values of friction coefficient (0–0.3). The pushing force varies from 0 (N) in pinch force of 1 (N) and the frictionless situation to 6.125 (N) in pinch force of 6 (N) and the friction coefficient equal to 0.3. Changing the shape of jaws can increase the pushing force up to 100%. The results could help surgeons to predict the correlation between grasping conditions and applied forces for a safe grasping procedure in the laparoscopic operations.