Accurate characterization of the mechanical behavior of soft tissues is needed for medical simulation, diagnostic, and tissue engineering purposes. Determining the complex behavior of soft tissues requires mechanical testing in their natural state. Such in vivo tests are wrought with ethical, accessibility, physiological noise, and uncontrolled boundary condition issues. Several groups have dev...

Tissue engineering may be defined as the application of biological, chemical and engineering principles toward the repair, restoration or regeneration of living tissue using biomaterials, cells and biologically active molecules alone or in combinations. The rapid restoration of tissue biomechanical function represents a great challenge, highlighting the need to mimic tissue structure and mechan...

Objective: The main cause of lethality in the autoimmune connective tissue disease scleroderma is organ fibrosis. Cellular behavior is altered by their local microenvironment, which includes enhanced local stimulation of mechanical signaling pathways. Fibrotic lesions are, by their nature, characterized by significantly enhanced mechanical forces relative to healthy tissue. Previous evidence fr...

Bilston LE, Gandevia SC. Biomechanical properties of the human upper airway and their effect on its behavior during breathing and in obstructive sleep apnea. J Appl Physiol 116: 314 –324, 2014. First published July 3, 2013; doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00539.2013.—The upper airway is a complex, multifunctional, dynamic neuromechanical system. Its patency during breathing requires moment-to-moment c...

Life is mechanobiological: mechanical stimuli play a pivotal role in the formation of structurally and functionally appropriate body templates through mechanobiologically-driven cellular and tissue re/modeling. The body responds to mechanical stimuli engendered through physical movement in an integrated fashion, internalizing and transferring forces from organ, through tissue and cellular lengt...

To elucidate the dynamic and functional role of a cell within the tissue it belongs to, it is essential to understand its material properties. The cell is a viscoelastic material with highly unusual properties. Measurements of the mechanical behavior of cells are beginning to probe the contribution of constituent components to cell mechanics. Reconstituted cytoskeletal protein networks have bee...

Surgical mesh devices composed of synthetic materials are commonly used for ventral hernia repair. These materials provide robust mechanical strength and are quickly incorporated into host tissue; factors that contribute to reduced hernia recurrence rates. However, such mesh devices cause a foreign body response with the associated complications of fibrosis and patient discomfort. In contrast, ...

In this paper, an analytical study is made for the dynamic behavior of human brain tissue under transient loading. In this analytical model the Mooney-Rivlin constitutive law is coupled with visco-elastic constitutive equations to take into account both the nonlinear and time-dependent mechanical behavior of brain tissue. Five ordinary differential equations representing the relationships of fi...

The knowledge of brain tissue mechanical properties is a critical issue in the head injury biomechanics research field. Due to experimental limitations, brain tissue has been characterized in vitro, whereas its actual in vivo behavior remains poorly known. We propose the use of Magnetic Resonance Elastography as a non invasive, non destructive tool for measuring the viscoelastic properties of b...