ORTHOTROPIC MEMBRANE AS A MECHANICAL MODEL OF SURGICAL IMPLANT IN ABDOMINAL HERNIA REPAIR

Abstract

Even though the incisional hernia repair surgery is a well known procedure, mechanical properties of the tissue-implant system are unknown, so the implantation of the repairing mesh is quite intuitive, and recurrences of the condition continue to occur.

The main objective of the study is to define a model of repaired hernia that can be used for surgery planning and assessment of the repair durability. The load applied to the structure corresponds to this widely accepted model as the one that can cause hernia recurrence. In the proposed solution, the reaction forces calculated when the extreme abdominal pressure acts on the model are considered as the crucial factors in the repair planning and the connection strength evaluation. These reactions representing the tissue-implant junction forces cannot exceed the limit value experimentally obtained for the synthetic mesh and porcine tissue connection described in literature.

The achieved finite element simulations results are compared with the experiments and the proposed solution shows good accuracy.