A biomechanical model of the human tongue and its clinical implications Many surgical technics act on the upper airway in general, and on the tongue in particular. For example, tongue is one of the anatomical structures involved in the case of Pierre Robin syndrome, mandibular prognathism, or sleep apnoea syndrome. This paper presents the biomechanical and dynamical model of the human tongue we have developed, and the method we have used to fit this model to the anatomical and physical properties of a given patientu0027s tongue. Each step of the modeling process is precisely described: the soft tissues modeling through the Finite Element Method (geometrical design of the FE structure within the upper airway and representation of lingual musculature), and the motor control of the model with the corresponding dynamical simulations. Finally, the syndromes listed above are presented, with some focus on the clinical implications of the model.

Efficient 3D Finite Element Modeling of a MuscleActivated Tongue We describe our investigation of a fast 3D finite element method (FEM) for biomedical simulation of a muscleactivated human tongue. Our method uses a linear stiffnesswarping scheme to achieve simulation speeds which are within a factor 10 of realtime rates at the expense of a small loss in accuracy. Muscle activations are produced by an arrangement of forces acting along selected edges of the FEM geometry. The modelu0027s dynamics are integrated using an implicit Euler formulation, which can be solved using either the conjugate gradient method or a direct sparse solver. To assess the utility of this model, we compare its accuracy against slower, but less approximate, simulations of a reference tongue model prepared using the FEM simulation package ANSYS.