Development of Multibody Soft Tissue Models and Their Tuning to Experimental Data: With a Focus in the Canine Meniscus

Abstract

This study explores the application of multibody modeling techniques in an attempt to capture the flexible behavior of biological tissues inside of a rigid body mechanics software. To accomplish this, segmented multibody models of canine menisci were created and the parameters governing the interaction of adjacent segments were tuned to create an overall physiological meniscus behavior. To this extent an experiment was designed to determine whole meniscus deformation under a semi-physiological loading. Additionally, indentation testing of articular cartilage of the canine stifle was performed with the intent of calibrating a cartilage multibody model. The meniscus testing included both sinusoidal and linear ramp loading profiles as well as two separate boundary conditions. Design of Experiments was then used to minimize the error in the model relative to the sinusoidal trials and the ramp profiles were used for validation. While the method proved capable of representing the experimental behavior the optimized parameter sets did not correlate with each other as well as expected.