Identification of the mechanical parameters for the human uterus in vivo using intrauterine pressure measurements.

There are limited experimental data to characterize the mechanical response of human myometrium. A method is presented in this work to identify mechanical parameters describing the active response of human myometrium from the in vivo intrauterine pressure measurements. The human uterine contraction during labor is simulated by implementing a coupled model in a finite element scheme, and the intrauterine pressure is evaluated as the outcome. A meta-model is developed to approximate the finite element simulation response with a lower computational cost and used to identify model parameters through fitting its prediction to the in vivo measurements. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.