A biomechanical model of the female reproductive system and the fetus for the realization of a childbirth virtual simulator

Our main work consists in modeling of the female pelvis and uterus, as well as the human fetus. The goal of this work is to recover the different forces generated during the delivery. These forces will be input to the haptic obstetric training tool BirthSim which has already been developed by the Ampe're Laboratory at the INSA of Lyon. This modeling process will permit us to develop a new training device to take into account different anatomies and different types of delivery. In this paper, we will firstly show the different existing haptic and virtual simulators in the obstetric world with their advantages and drawbacks. After, we will present our approach based on a biomechanical modeling of concerned organs. To obtain interactive time performance, we proceed by the simplification of the organs anatomy. Then, we present some results showing that FEM analysis can be used to model forces during childbirth. In the future, we plan to use this work to more accurately control a childbirth simulator.