Constitutive Modelling of Soft Biological Tissue from Ex Vivo to in Vivo: Myocardium as an Example

Abstract

Imbalance of stress/strain microenvironment can lead to adverse remodelling and pathogenesis in various soft tissues, tumour included. Therefore, there is a critical need for accurate quantification of the biomechanical homeostasis in soft tissue through mathematical modelling, which is critically dependent on constitutive models, the mathematical descriptions that approximate the mechanical behaviours of material under specific conditions by considering information from subcellular, cellular and tissue levels. In most soft biological tissue, collagen is the major component of the extracellular matrix, its architecture largely determines the material property (stiffness). In this work, we will use myocardium as an example to show how we can develop a constitutive law from various ex vivo experiments within the continuum mechanics framework, and demonstrate the applications to real patient data. We will further focus on parameter calibrations from ex/in vivo measurements. We believe this approach of constitutive modelling and calibration can be applied to various soft biological tissues and shed light on physiological and pathological mechanobiology.