Patient-Specific Computational Abdominal Wall Modeling: Application to Mid-Line Laparotomy Closure

A patient-specific computational finite element modeling of the abdominal wall (AW) has been developed to enable biomechanical analysis for customizing and optimizing AW surgical treatments. The methodology consisted on the identification by reverse engineering of patient-specific AW characteristics for physiological pressure settings. The approach combined in vivo experiments and numerical simulations. As a first application, a patient specific model was used to simulate mid-line incision closure technique.