Soft tissue characterization and modeling based on living tissues has been investigated in order to provide a more realistic behavior in a virtual reality based surgical simulation. In this paper, we characterize the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of intra-abdominal organs using the data from in vivo animal experiments and inverse FE parameter estimation algorithm. In the assumptions of quasi-linear-viscoelastic theory, we estimated the viscoelastic and hyerelastic material parameters to provide a physically based simulation of tissue deformations. To calibrate the parameters to the experimental results, we developed a three dimensional FE model to simulate the forces at the indenter and an optimization program that updates new parameters and runs the simulation iteratively. We can successfully reduce the time and computation resources by decoupling the viscoelastic part and nonlinear elastic part in a tissue model. The comparison between simulation and experimental behavior of pig intra abdominal soft tissue are presented to provide a validness of the tissue model using our approach.