SOniCS: Develop intuition on biomechanical systems through interactive error controlled simulations

This new approach allows the user to experiment with model choices
easily and quickly without requiring in-depth expertise, as constitutive models can be modified by one line of code only. This ease in building new models makes SOniCS ideal to develop surrogate, reduced order mod- els and to train machine learning algorithms for uncertainty quantification or to enable patient-specific simulations. SOniCS is thus not only a tool that facilitates the development of surgical training simulations but also, and perhaps more importantly, paves the way to increase the intuition of users or otherwise non-intuitive behaviors of (bio)mechanical systems. The plugin uses new developments of the FEniCSx project enabling au- tomatic generation with FFCx of finite element tensors such as the local residual vector and Jacobian matrix. We validate our approach with nu- merical simulations such as manufactured solutions, cantilever beams, and benchmarks provided by FEBio. We reach machine precision accuracy and demonstrate the use of the plugin for a real-time haptic simulation involv- ing a surgical tool controlled by the user in contact with a hyperelastic liver. We include complete examples showing the use of our plugin for sim- ulations involving Saint Venant-Kirchhoff, Neo-Hookean, Mooney-Rivlin, and Holzapfel Ogden anisotropic models as supplementary material.