  This paper introduces the methodology proposed by our group to model the
biological soft tissues deformations and to couple these models with
Computer-Assisted Surgical (CAS) applications. After designing CAS protocols
that mainly focused on bony structures, the Computer Aided Medical Imaging
group of Laboratory TIMC (CNRS, France) now tries to take into account the
behaviour of soft tissues in the CAS context. For this, a methodology,
originally published under the name of the Mesh-Matching method, has been
proposed to elaborate patient specific models. Starting from an elaborate
manually-built "generic" Finite Element (FE) model of a given anatomical
structure, models adapted to the geometries of each new patient ("patient
specific" FE models) are automatically generated through a non-linear elastic
registration algorithm. This paper presents the general methodology of the
Mesh-Matching method and illustrates this process with two clinical
applications, namely the orbital and the maxillofacial computer-assisted
surgeries.
