ASA 126th Meeting Denver 1993 October 4-8

1pSP15. The 3-D-tongue FEM model revised.

Reiner Wilhelms-Tricarico

ATR International, Kyoto, Japan

Chao-Min Wu

Biomed. Eng. Ctr., Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH 43210-1002

As a first application of a newly developed object-oriented finite element code that is specialized for the modeling of biological tissues we have been reimplementing the geometry of the tongue model by S. Kirtani et al. (``A computational model of the tongue,'' Ann. Bul. Res. Inst. of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Univ. Tokyo, Vol. 10, pp. 243--251). The new implementation uses large strain and dynamic modeling of the tissue, includes the effects of inertia and observes precisely a weak formulation of the incompressibility constraint of the tissue. The muscle activation input for the current model is made similar to the original computation. However, a different, more realistic nonlinear muscle model is used, in which the active stress depends on the instantaneous strain and strain rate in the direction of the muscle fibers. The implementation methods and computational results will be presented. [Work supported by the Whitaker Foundation and by ATR-International.]