Letter to the editor: Current progress in patient-specific modeling by Neal and Kerckhoffs (2010)

A recent review article on 'Current progress in patient-specific modeling' in Briefings in Bioinformatics contains the statement summarizing the results of our previous study 'On the unimportance of constitutive models in computing brain deformation for image-guided surgery' published in Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology as confirmation of adequacy of linear elastic model for such computation. The purpose of this Letter to the Editor is to clarify this statement by informing the Readers of Briefings in Bioinformatics that our study indicates the following: (i) a simple linear elastic constitutive model for the brain tissue is sufficient when used with an appropriate finite deformation solution (i.e. geometrically non-linear analysis); and (ii) Linear analysis approach that assumes infinitesimally small brain deformations leads to unrealistic results.