Open Access

Cornelia Kober, Bodo Erdmann, Jens Lang, Robert Sader, Hans-Florian Zeilhofer

• Structural mechanics simulation of bony organs is of general medical and biomechanical interest, because of the interdependence of the inner architecture of bone and its functional loading already stated by Wolff in 1892. This work is part of a detailed research project concerning the human mandible. By adaptive finite element techniques, stress/strain profiles occurring in the bony structure under biting were simulated. Estimates of the discretization errors, local grid refinement, and multilevel techniques guarantee the reliability and efficiency of the method. In general, our simulation requires a representation of the organ's geometry, an appropriate material description, and the load case due to teeth, muscle, or joint forces. In this paper, we want to focus on the influence of the masticatory system. Our goal is to capture the physiological situation as far as possible. By means of visualization techniques developed by the group, we are able to extract individual muscle fibres from computed tomography data. By a special algorithm, the fibres are expanded to fanlike (esp. for the musc. temporalis) coherent vector fields similar to the anatomical reality. The activity of the fibres can be adapted according to compartmentalisation of the muscles as measured by electromyological experiments. A refined sensitivity analysis proved remarkable impact of the presented approach on the simulation results.