Pierre Badel

• PhD
• IFMK

So far, the prevalent rupture risk quantification of aortic aneurysms does not consider information of the underlying microscopic mechanisms. Uniaxial tension tests were performed on imaged aorta samples oriented in circumferential and longitudinal directions. To account for local heterogeneity in collagen fiber architecture, SHG imaging was perfor...

Aortic aneurysm rupture is a sudden local event with high mortality. It is generally accepted that the adventitia acts as the final barrier protecting the aorta from over-expansion. Currently, the knowledge of microscopic structural determinants of the tissue's mechanical response and failure is very limited. The purpose of this study is to provide...

Purpose The human body is a complex structure. Its strength is ensured by the collagen protein which exists under the form of fibers. The quantitative analysis of these fibers in biological tissues can be very interesting to establish a relationship between the microstructure and their functions. This analysis is usually performed using two-photon...

Aortic dissection is a complex, intramural, and dynamic condition involving multiple mechanisms, hence, difficult to observe. In the present study, a controlled in vitro aortic dissection was performed using tension-inflation tests on notched rabbit aortic segments. The mechanical test was combined with conventional (cCT) and synchrotron (sCT) comp...

The decision of surgical intervention for an aortic aneurysm is usually associated with an assessment of risk of its rupture. Global rupture risk assessment parameters like wall diameter and growth of the aneurysm over time often fail at predicting the risk of rupture with accuracy. This paper will investigate the hypothesis that the tissue’s micro...

The most common method to study the mechanical behavior of soft tissue is to test animal specimens, which should be prepared as soon as possible after the death to avoid biological deterioration effects such as rigor mortis. Freezing and cryo-preservation could allow extending the time between procurement and implantation. From a mechanical perspec...

Interface pressure applied by compression bandages is the therapeutic action of the treatment of some venous or lymphatic pathologies. The so-called Static Stiffness Index, which quantifies the pressure increase from supine to standing position, is usually used to differentiate compression bandages. It was hypothesized that this pressure increase w...

Background Digital image correlation (DIC) methods are increasingly used for non-contact optical assessment of geometry and deformation in soft tissue biomechanics, thus providing the full-field strain estimates needed for robust inverse material characterization. Despite the well-known flexibility and ease of use of DIC, issues related to spatial...

Objective: Aortic dissection is a life-threatening event which starts most of the time with an intimal tear propagating along the aortic wall, while blood enters the medial layer and delaminates the medial lamellar units. Studies investigating the mechanisms underlying the initiation sequence of aortic dissection are rare in the literature, the ma...

Lesions of the Musculotendinous Unit (MTU, i.e. tendon, myotendinous junction, muscle, aponeurosis and myoaponeurotic junction) are a common injury and a leading cause of functional impairment, long-term pain, and/or physical disability worldwide. Though a large effort has been devoted to macroscopic failure evaluation, these injuries suffer from a...

A computational strategy based on the finite element method for simulating the mechanical response of arterial tissues is herein proposed. The adopted constitutive formulation accounts for rotations of the adventitial collagen fibers and introduces parameters which are directly measurable or well established. Moreover, the refined constitutive mode...

In order to study Musculo-Tendinous Unit (MTU) failure mechanisms and locations, rupture tests in mode I were performed through tensile tests (in the fibre and transverse directions) as well as peeling tests (to better investigate the transverse cohesion between muscle fibres), and mode II through shear lap tests (either at the muscle/muscle or mus...

Elastic compression of the lower leg is the traditional preventive and curative treatment of venous insufficiency. After presenting the medical strategies related to compression therapies, this chapter develops current advances in clinics as well as in engineering and outline the more important knowledge arising from this review. Compression hosier...

Background It is commonly admitted that a dissection initiates with an intimal tear or at least a defect inside the arterial wall. Nevertheless, few studies investigated the initiation sequence due to the difficulty to monitor this process. Objective The objective of this work was to observe and investigate the mechanisms leading an intimal tear t...

Aortic dissection is a life-threatening event associated with a very poor outcome. A number of complex phenomena are involved in the initiation and propagation of the disease. Advances in the comprehension of the mechanisms leading to dissection have been made these last decades thanks to improvements in imaging and experimental techniques. However...

Fibrous collagen networks are well known to play a central role in the passive biomechanical response of soft connective tissues to applied loads. In the current chapter we focus on vascular tissues and share our extensive experience in coupling mechanical loading and multiphoton imaging to investigate, across arteries, species and testing conditio...

Fabric-to-fabric friction is involved in the action mechanism of medical compression devices such as compression bandages or lumbar belts. To better understand the action of such devices, it is essential to characterize, in their use conditions (mainly pressure and stretch), the frictional properties of the fabrics they are composed of. A character...

Abdominal aortic aneurysm is a prevalent cardiovascular disease with high mortality rates. The mechanical response of the arterial wall relies on the organizational and structural behavior of its microstructural components, and thus, a detailed understanding of the microscopic mechanical response of the arterial wall layers at loads ranging up to r...

Ascending thoracic aortic aneurysm (ATAA) ruptures are life threatening phenomena which occur in local weaker regions of the diseased aortic wall. As ATAAs are evolving pathologies, their growth represents a significant local remodeling and degradation of the microstructural architecture and thus their mechanical properties. To address the need for...

This work presents a novel computational model that captures the complexity of the load-induced micro-structural morphological changes.The proposed framework, providing data about the stress and strain patterns at the different length scale of the arterial tissue, can open to clarify the aetiology of the aneurysms and the patho-physiological remode...

Aortic dissection represents a serious cardio-vascular disease and life-threatening event. Dissection is a sudden delamination event of the wall, possibly leading to rupture within a few hours. Current knowledge and practical criteria to understand and predict this phenomenon lack reliable models and experimental observations of rupture at the lame...

Objectifs Les dispositifs médicaux de compression (DMC) constituent le traitement de référence de l’insuffisance veineuse. Ces dispositifs sont basés sur des textiles tissés ou tricotés, chaussettes, bas ou bandes, et agissent sur les jambes par compression ou contention. Leur action mécanique doit être contrôlée, cependant aucune norme européenne...

Objective: To develop a new method for the prediction of interface pressure applied by medical compression bandages. Methods: A finite element simulation of bandage application was designed, based on patient-specific leg geometries. For personalized interface pressure prediction, a model reduction approach was proposed, which included the parame...

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation is a recent mini‐invasive procedure to implant an aortic valve prosthesis. Prosthesis positioning in transcatheter aortic valve implantation appears as an important aspect for the success of the intervention. Accordingly, we developed a patient‐specific finite element framework to predict the insertion of the...

This chapter presents a quick and efficient approach to performing patient-specific finite-element (FE) predictions of the human calf response under elastic compression. The reconstruction of patient-specific material properties of soft tissues is based on two methodologies described extensively in two previous papers (. Frauziols et al., 2015, 201...

Detailed characterization of damage and rupture mechanics of arteries is one the current challenges in vascular biomechanics, which requires developing suitable experimental approaches. This paper introduces an approach using in situ tensile tests in an X-ray micro-tomography setup to observe mechanisms of damage initiation and progression in media...

Objective The objective of this study was to investigate the pressure applied by superimposed bandages and to compare it with the pressure applied by single-component bandages. Methods Six different bandages, composed of one elastic bandage, one nonelastic bandage, or both, were applied in a spiral pattern on both legs of 25 patients at risk of ve...

Disorders in the wall microstructure underlie all forms of vascular disease, such as the aortic aneurysm, the rupture of which is necessarily triggered at the microscopic level. In this context, we developed an original experimental approach, coupling a bulge inflation test to multiphoton confocal microscopy, for visualizing the 3D micro-structure...

Finite element analyses using cohesive zone models (CZM) can be used to predict the fracture of atherosclerotic plaques but this requires setting appropriate values of the model parameters. In this study, material parameters of a CZM were identified for the first time on two groups of mice (ApoE-/- and ApoE-/- Col8-/-) using the measured force-disp...

A non-invasive method is proposed to identify in vivo the passive mechanical properties of deep soft tissues in the human leg. Force-displacement curves in response to a localized compression of the calf are measured with a custom made experimental set-up. The material parameters of a finite element model are then calibrated against the experimenta...

Objective Compression bandages are commonly used in the treatment of some venous or lymphatic pathologies. The success of the treatment relies on the applied pressure, which depends on several parameters, especially the bandage properties but also patients’ morphology. A previous experimental study showed that considering only patient's morphology...

Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) accounts for one of the most promising new cardiovascular procedures. This minimally invasive technique is still at its early stage and is constantly developing thanks to imaging techniques, computer science, biomechanics and technologies of prosthesis and delivery tools. As a result, patient-specific...

Compression therapy with stockings or bandages is the most common treatment for venous or lymphatic disorders. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of bandage mechanical properties, application technique and subject morphology on the interface pressure, which is the key of this treatment. Bandage stretch and interface pressu...

The mechanical behavior of aortic stent-grafts plays an important role in the success of endovascular surgery for aneurysms. In this study, finite element analysis was carried out to simulate the expansion of five marketed stent-graft iliac limbs and to evaluate quantitatively their mechanical performances. The deployment was modeled in a simplifi...

The purpose of this study was to determine biomechanical properties of linea alba subjected to transverse planar tension and to compare its behavior at different locations of the abdominal wall. Samples of linea alba from five different porcine abdominal walls were tested in planar tension. During these tests, strain maps were measured for the firs...

Goal: In the present study, the biomechanical response of soft tissues from the fascia cruris to the skin is studied in the human leg under elastic compression. Methods: The distribution of elastic moduli in these tissues is measured for a volunteer at inactive and active muscle states using transient ultrasound elastography (TUSE). After regist...

Clinicians generally assume that Medical Compression Stockings (MCS) work by reducing vein luminal diameter and, in this way, help to prevent blood pooling. Conflicting results have been reported however in the case of lower leg deep veins which call into question this hypothesis. The purpose of this contribution is to study the biomechanical respo...

Compression of the lower leg by bandages is a common treatment for the advanced stages of some venous or lymphatic pathologies. The outcomes of this treatment directly result from the pressure generated onto the limb. Various bandage configurations are proposed by manufacturers: the study of these configurations requires the development of reliable...

Renal arteries provide blood and nutrients to the kidneys, which are high demand organs. It is important to determine how these arteries behave under physiological loadings and their stress/strain response to increasing pressure and tension. To determine the passive mechanical behavior of both the porcine renal artery and its first branch, we perfo...

In this study, finite element analysis is used to simulate the surgical deployment procedure of a bifurcated stent-graft on a real patient's arterial geometry. The stent-graft is modeled using realistic constitutive properties for both the stent and most importantly for the graft. The arterial geometry is obtained from pre-operative imaging exam. T...

Balloon angioplasty is a standard clinical treatment for symptomatic coronary artery disease. In this procedure, controlled damage is applied intraluminally to the wall of a stenotic artery. Dissection of the coronary artery is a commonly observed clinical complication of angioplasty; however, not all dissections can be detected angioscopically. Th...

In this study, bulge inflation tests were used to characterize the failure response of 15 layers of human ascending thoracic aortic aneurysms (ATAA). Full field displacement data were collected during each of the mechanical tests using a digital image stereo-correlation (DIS-C) system. Using the collected displacement data, the local stress fields...

The endovascular treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysm (EVAR) consists of inserting a delivery system through intravascular pathway and deploying one or several stent-grafts at the aneurysm site in order to exclude it. This procedure has proven to have a high success rate for eligible patient population and benefits in terms of reduced blood loss,...

Purpose To assess numerically the flexibility and mechanical stresses undergone by stents and fabric of currently manufactured stent-grafts. Methods Eight marketed stent-graft limbs (Aorfix, Anaconda, Endurant, Excluder, Talent, Zenith Flex, Zenith LP, and Zenith Spiral-Z) were modeled using finite element analysis. A numerical benchmark combining...

The mechanisms giving rise to vein tortuosity, which is often associated with varicosis, are poorly understood. Recent works suggest that significant biological changes in the wall of varicose veins may precede the mechanical aspects of the disease. To test the hypothesis of tortuosity being a consequence of these changes, a Finite Element model wa...

It is known that arteries experience significant axial stretches in vivo. Several authors have shown that the axial force needed to maintain an artery at its in vivo axial stretch does not change with transient cyclical pressurization over normal ranges. However, the axial force phenomenon of arteries has never been explained with microstructural c...

Quantifying the stiffness properties of soft tissues is essential for the diagnosis of many cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. In these pathologies it is widely agreed that the arterial wall stiffness is an indicator of vulnerability. The present paper focuses on the carotid artery and proposes a new inversion methodology for deriving...

The stiffness of the arterial wall, which is modified by many cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, is known to be an indicator of vulnerability. This work focuses on the in vivo quantification of the stiffness of the common carotid artery (CCA) by applying the Magnitude Based Finite Element Model Updating (MB-FEMU) method to 13 healthy...

Arterial tissue consists of multiple structurally important constituents that have individual material properties and associated stress-free configurations that evolve over time. This gives rise to residual stresses contributing to the homoeostatic state of stress in vivo as well as adaptations to perturbed loads, disease or injury. The existence o...

Compression therapy is used in the management and the treatment of various forms of venous insufficiency ranging from the relief of heavy and achy legs to the treatment of more severe forms such as acute venous ulceration. However, the pressure needed to achieve clinical benefit is a matter of debate. The purpose of this study was to examine the tr...

Arterial tissue consists of multiple structurally important constituents that have individual material properties and associated stress-free configurations that evolve over time. This gives rise to residual stresses contributing to the homoeostatic state of stress in vivo as well as adaptations to perturbed loads, disease or injury. The existence o...

Quantifying the stiffness properties of soft tissues is essential for the diagnosis of many cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. In these pathologies it is widely agreed that the arterial wall stiffness is an indicator of vulnerability. The present paper focuses on the carotid artery and proposes a new inversion methodology for deriving...

A patient-specific finite-element (FE) model of the human leg is developed to model the stress distribution in and around a vein wall in order to determine the biomechanical response of varicose veins to compression treatment. The aim is to investigate the relationship between the local pressure on the soft tissues induced by wearing the compressio...

In this study the digital image correlation technique is used for characterizing the mechanical and rupture properties of aneurysmal tissues. The tissues which have been taken from the thoracic ascending aorta of diseased patients are tested in a bulge inflation test. The approach is original in the sense that it gives access to the local stress fi...

Stent-grafts (SGs) are commonly used for treating abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) and numerical models tend to be developed for predicting the biomechanical behavior of these devices. However, due to the complexity of SGs, it is important to validate the models. In this work, a validation of the numerical model developed in Demanget et al. (J. Me...

Compression therapy is used in the management and the treatment of various forms of venous insufficiency ranging from the relief of heavy and achy legs to the treatment of more severe forms such as acute venous ulceration. However , the pressure needed to achieve clinical benefit is a matter of debate. The purpose of this study was to examine the t...

The role of mechanics is known to be of primary order in many arterial diseases; however, determining mechanical properties of arteries remains a challenge. This paper discusses the identifiability of the passive mechanical properties of a mouse carotid artery, taking into account the orientation of collagen fibres in the medial and adventitial lay...

Secondary interventions after endovascular repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms are frequent because stent-graft (SG) related complications may occur (mainly endoleak and SG thrombosis). Complications have been related to insufficient SG flexibility, especially when devices are deployed in tortuous arteries. Little is known on the relationship betw...

Assessing the vulnerability of atherosclerotic plaques requires an accurate knowledge of the mechanical properties of the plaque constituents. It is possible to measure displacements in vivo inside a plaque using magnetic resonance imaging. An important issue is to solve the inverse problem that consists in estimating the elastic properties inside...

Leg compression is the process of applying external compression forces onto the human leg with stockings or socks, with the purpose of treating venous deficiency, recovering from a sporting competition, or simply as prevention against the economy-class syndrome for transcontinental flights. The objective of this book chapter is to present a computa...

X-ray tomography is a non-destructive technique which allows reconstruction of the internal geometry of opaque and massive materials in three dimensions (3D). This chapter first discusses the capabilities of this technique in the field of the mechanics of composite reinforcements. It then describes methods of analysing reconstructed data at differe...