Design and comparison of computationally efficient uniaxial stress-strain models of the lung parenchyma for real-time applications.

Real-time clinical applications such as robotic lung surgery, tumor localization, atelectasis diagnosis, tumor motion prediction for radiation therapy of lung cancer, or surgery training are in need of biomechanical models of lungs, not necessarily highly accurate, but with good computational properties. These properties can include one or several of the following: low computation time, low memory resource requirement, a low number of parameters, and ease of parameter identification in real-time. Among the numerous existing models of lung parenchyma, some may be well suited for real-time applications; however, they should be extensively assessed against both accuracy and computational efficiency criteria to make an informed choice depending on the requirements of the application.