  In the 80's, biomechanicians were asked to work on Computer Aided Surgery
applications since orthopaedic surgeons were looking for numerical tools able
to predict risks of fractures. More recently, biomechanicians started to
address soft tissues arguing that most of the human body is made of such
tissues that can move as well as deform during surgical gestures [1]. An
intra-operative use of a continuous Finite Element (FE) Model of a given tissue
mainly faces two problems: (1) the numerical simulations have to be
"interactive", i.e. sufficiently fast to provide results during surgery (which
can be a strong issue in the context of hyperelastic models for example) and
(2) during the intervention, the surgeon needs a device that can be used to
provide to the model an estimation of the patient-specific constitutive
behaviour of the soft tissues. This work proposes an answer to the second
point, with the design of a new aspiration device aiming at characterizing the
in vivo constitutive laws of human soft tissues. The device was defined in
order to permit sterilization as well an easy intra-operative use.
