Publication Date
3-1-2025
Journal
Medical Physics
DOI
10.1002/mp.17554
PMID
39642013
PMCID
PMC12097712
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
3-1-2026
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Author MSS
Abstract
Background: Surgical planning for orthognathic procedures demands swift and accurate biomechanical modeling of facial soft tissues. Efficient simulations are vital in the clinical pipeline, as surgeons may iterate through multiple plans. Biomechanical simulations typically use the finite element method (FEM). Prior works divide FEM simulations into increments to enhance convergence and accuracy. However, this practice elongates simulation time, thereby impeding clinical integration. To accelerate simulations, deep learning (DL) models have been explored. Yet, previous efforts either perform simulations in a single step or neglect the temporal aspects in incremental simulations.
Purpose: This study investigates the use of spatiotemporal incremental modeling for biomechanics simulations of facial soft tissue.
Methods: We implement the method using a graph neural network. Our method synergizes spatial features with temporal aggregation using DL networks trained on incremental FEM simulations from 17 subjects that underwent orthognathic surgery.
Results: Our proposed spatiotemporal incremental method achieved a mean accuracy of 0.37 mm with a mean computation time of 1.52 s. In comparison, a spatial-only incremental method yielded a mean accuracy of 0.44 mm and a mean computation time of 1.60 s, while a spatial-only single-step method yielded a mean accuracy of 0.41 mm and a mean computation time of 0.05 s.
Conclusions: Statistical analysis demonstrated that the spatiotemporal incremental method reduced mean errors compared to the spatial-only incremental method, emphasizing the importance of incorporating temporal information in incremental simulations. Overall, we successfully implemented spatiotemporal incremental learning tailored to simulate soft tissue deformation while substantially reducing simulation time compared to FEM.
Keywords
Humans, Biomechanical Phenomena, Finite Element Analysis, Deep Learning, Mechanical Phenomena, Computer Simulation, Face, deep learning, facial simulation, incremental modeling, neural network, surgical planning
Published Open-Access
yes
Recommended Citation
Lampen, Nathan; Kim, Daeseung; Xu, Xuanang; et al., "Learning Soft Tissue Deformation From Incremental Simulations" (2025). Faculty, Staff and Students Publications. 6919.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/baylor_docs/6919