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ABSTRACT: Cartilage is a multi-phase material composed of fluid and electrolytes (68-85% by wet weight), proteoglycans (5-10% by wet weight), chondrocytes, collagen fibres and other glycoproteins. The solid phase constitutes an isotropic proteoglycan gel and a fibre network of predominantly type II collagen, which provides tensile strength and mechanical stiffness. The same two components control diffusion of the fluid phase, e.g. as visualised by diffusion tensor MRI: (i) the proteoglycan gel (giving a baseline isotropic diffusivity) and (ii) the highly anisotropic collagenous fibre network. We propose a new constitutive model and finite element implementation that focus on the essential load-bearing morphology: an incompressible, poroelastic solid matrix reinforced by an inhomogeneous, dispersed fibre fabric, which is saturated with an incompressible fluid residing in strain-dependent pores of the collagen-proteoglycan solid matrix. The inhomogeneous, dispersed fibre fabric of the solid further influences the fluid permeability, as well as an intrafibrillar portion that cannot be 'squeezed out' from the tissue. Using representative numerical examples on the mechanical response of cartilage, we reproduce several features that have been demonstrated experimentally in the cartilage mechanics literature.
Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering 07/2012; · 0.85 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: In this work, we outline an automated method for the extraction and quantification of material parameters characterizing collagen fibre orientations from two-dimensional images. Morphological collagen data among different length scales were obtained by combining the established methods of Fourier power spectrum analysis, wedge filtering and progressive regions of interest splitting. Our proposed method yields data from which we can determine parameters for computational modelling of soft biological tissues using fibre-reinforced constitutive models and gauge the length scales most appropriate for obtaining a physically meaningful measure of fibre orientations, which is representative of the true tissue morphology of the two-dimensional image. Specifically, we focus on three parameters quantifying different aspects of the collagen morphology: first, using maximum-likelihood estimation, we extract location parameters that accurately determine the angle of the principal directions of the fibre reinforcement (i.e. the preferred fibre directions); second, using a dispersion model, we obtain dispersion parameters quantifying the collagen fibre dispersion about these principal directions; third, we calculate the weighted error entropy as a measure of changes in the entire fibre distributions at different length scales, as opposed to their average behaviour. With fully automated imaging techniques (such as multiphoton microscopy) becoming increasingly popular (which often yield large numbers of images to analyse), our method provides an ideal tool for quickly extracting mechanically relevant tissue parameters which have implications for computational modelling (e.g. on the mesh density) and can also be used for the inhomogeneous modelling of tissues.
Journal of The Royal Society Interface 07/2012; 9(76):3081-93. · 4.40 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Many treatments for cardiovascular diseases include an endovascular insertion of stents or stent grafts into arteries, a procedure which may cause high tissue stresses and even damage in the arterial wall. In order to study such problems by using finite element methods, both appropriate constitutive models and experimental data on human tissue samples are required. Layer-specific experimental data for human tissue tested up to the supra-physiological loading range are rare in the literature. In this study, intact and layer-separated experimental data from uniaxial extension tests are presented for human thoracic and abdominal aortas with non-atherosclerotic intimal thickening undergoing supra-physiological loading. A novel pseudo-elastic damage model, proposed to describe discontinuous softening in aortic arterial tissues, is fit to the obtained experimental data. Fitting of the model with and without consideration of damage accumulation in the non-collagenous matrix material reveals that tissue damage is primarily related to the collagen fiber fabric. By employing the fit model, the effect of aortic tissue pre-conditioning on the material parameters from the resulting data fits is evaluated. Histological examination of the collagen fibers under different applied stretches is used to gain more insights into the structural changes of the tissue under supra-physiological loading.
Journal of the mechanical behavior of biomedical materials. 03/2012; 12:93-106.
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ABSTRACT: The established method of polarized microscopy in combination with a universal stage is used to determine the layer-specific distributed collagen fibre orientations in 11 human non-atherosclerotic thoracic and abdominal aortas and common iliac arteries (63 ± 15.3 years, mean ± s.d.). A dispersion model is used to quantify over 37 000 recorded fibre angles from tissue samples. The study resulted in distinct fibre families, fibre directions, dispersion and thickness data for each layer and all vessels investigated. Two fibre families were present for the intima, media and adventitia in the aortas, with often a third and sometimes a fourth family in the intima in the respective axial and circumferential directions. In all aortas, the two families were almost symmetrically arranged with respect to the cylinder axis, closer to the axial direction in the adventitia, closer to the circumferential direction in the media and in between in the intima. The same trend was found for the intima and adventitia of the common iliac arteries; however, there was only one preferred fibre alignment present in the media. In all locations and layers, the observed fibre orientations were always in the tangential plane of the walls, with no radial components and very small dispersion through the wall thickness. A wider range of in-plane fibre orientations was present in the intima than in the media and adventitia. The mean total wall thickness for the aortas and the common iliac artery was 1.39 and 1.05 mm, respectively. For the aortas, a slight thickening of the intima and a thinning of the media in increasingly distal regions were observed. A clear intimal thickening was present distal to the branching of the celiac arteries. All data, except for the media of the common iliac arteries, showed two prominent collagen fibre families for all layers so that two-fibre family models seem most appropriate.
Journal of The Royal Society Interface 12/2011; 9(71):1275-86. · 4.40 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Accurate techniques for simulating the deformation of soft biological tissues are an increasingly valuable tool in many areas of biomechanical analysis and medical image computing. To model the complex morphology and response of articular cartilage, a hyperviscoelastic (dispersed) fiber-reinforced constitutive model is employed to complete two specimen-specific finite element (FE) simulations of an indentation experiment, with and without considering fiber dispersion. Ultra-high field Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (17.6 T DT-MRI) is performed on a specimen of human articular cartilage before and after indentation to approximately 20% compression. Based on this DT-MRI data, we detail a novel FE approach to determine the geometry (edge detection from first eigenvalue), the meshing (semi-automated smoothing of DTI measurement voxels), and the fiber structural input (estimated principal fiber direction and dispersion). The global and fiber fabric deformations of both the un-dispersed and dispersed fiber models provide a satisfactory match to that estimated experimentally. In both simulations, the fiber fabric in the superficial and middle zones becomes more aligned with the articular surface, although the dispersed model appears more consistent with the literature. In the future, a multi-disciplinary combination of DT-MRI and numerical simulation will allow the functional state of articular cartilage to be determined in vivo.
Annals of biomedical engineering 03/2010; 38(7):2447-63. · 2.41 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Accurate techniques for simulating sof t biological tissue deformation are an increasingly valuable tool in many areas of biomechanical analysis and medical image computing. To model the morphology and the material response of human articular cartilage a phenomenological and patient-specific simulation approach incorporating the collagen fibre fabric is proposed. We then demonstrate a unique combination of ultra-high field Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (17.6T DT-MRI) and a novel numerical approach incorporating the empirical data to predict the collagen fibre fabric deformation for an indentation experiment (© 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
GAMM-Mitteilungen 11/2009; 32(2):157 - 177.
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ABSTRACT: To model the cartilage morphology and the material response, a phenomenological and patient-specific simulation approach incorporating the collagen fiber fabric is proposed. Cartilage tissue response is nearly isochoric and time-dependent under physiological pressure levels. Hence, a viscoelastic constitutive model capable of reproducing finite strains is employed, while the time-dependent deformation change is purely isochoric. The model incorporates seven material parameters, which all have a physical interpretation. To calibrate the model and facilitate further analysis, five human cartilage specimens underwent a number of tests. A series of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences is taken, next the cartilage surface is imaged, then mechanical indentation tests are completed at 2-7 different locations per sample, resulting in force/displacement data over time, and finally, the underlying bone surface is imaged. Imaging and mechanical testing are performed with a custom-built robotics-based testing device. Stereo reconstruction of the cartilage and subchondral bone surface is employed, which, together with the proposed constitutive model, led to specimen-specific finite element simulations of the mechanical indentation tests. The force-time response of 23 such indentation experiment simulations is optimized to estimate the mean material parameters and corresponding standard deviations. The model is capable of reproducing the deformation behavior of human articular cartilage in the physiological loading domain, as demonstrated by the good agreement between the experiment and numerical results (R(2)=0.95+/-0.03, mean+/-standard deviation of force-time response for 23 indentation tests). To address validation, a sevenfold cross-validation experiment is performed on the 21 experiments representing healthy cartilage. To quantify the predictive error, the mean of the absolute force differences and Pearson's correlation coefficient are both calculated. Deviations in the mean absolute difference, normalized by the peak force, range from 4% to 90%, with 40+/-25% (M+/-SD). The correlation coefficients across all predictions have a minimum of 0.939, and a maximum of 0.993 with 0.975+/-0.013 (M+/-SD), which demonstrates an excellent match of the decay characteristics. A novel feature of the proposed method is 3D sample-specific numerical tracking of the fiber fabric deformation under general loading. This feature is demonstrated by comparing the estimated fiber fabric deformation with recently published experimental data determined by diffusion tensor MRI. The proposed approach is efficient enough to enable large-scale 3D contact simulations of knee joint loading in simulations with accurate joint geometries.
Journal of Biomechanical Engineering 10/2009; 131(9):091006. · 1.90 Impact Factor
