Biomechanical Aspects Of Soft Tissues

Biomechanics applies the laws and techniques of mechanics in the study of biological systems and related phenomena. Biomechanics uses mathematical and computational tools such as model construction of musclo-skeletal system, body fluid circulation, to aid medical diagnosis, therapeutics and surgery planning, designing of prostheses and implants or in tissue engineering. Present book targets specific topics pertaining to the biomechanics of soft tissues. Subjects addressed includes solids and multi-species mixtures as open systems: a continuum mechanics perspective; electro-chemo-mechanical couplings: tissues with a fixed electric charge and growth of biological tissues.

The emerging paradigm of incorporating images and biomechanical properties of soft tissues has proven to be an integral part of the advancement of several medical applications, including image guided radiotherapy and surgery, brachytherapy, and diagnostics. This expansion has resulted in a growing community of medical, science, and engineering professionals applying mechanical principles to address medical concerns. This book is tailored to cover a range of mechanical principles, properties, and applications of soft tissues that have previously been addressed in various journals and "anatomical site-specific" books. Biomechanics of Soft Tissues follows a different approach by offering a simplified overview of widely used mechanical models and measuring techniques of soft tissue parameters. This is followed by an investigation of different medical applications, including: biomechanical aspects of cancerous tumor progressions, radiotherapy treatment, and image guided ultrasound guided interventions. Written by leading scholars and professionals in the field, Biomechanics of Soft Tissues combines engineering and medical expertise, thereby producing an excellent source of information for professionals interested in the theoretical and technological advancements related to soft tissues. The book provides medical professionals with an insight on various modeling approaches, testing techniques, and mechanical characteristics that are frequently used by engineers. Conversely, the presented medical applications provide engineers with a glimpse of amazing medical practices and encourage them to expand their roles in the medical field. Provides a simplified overview of mechanics of soft tissues. Highlights different techniques to measure tissues properties for engineering and medical applications. Contains novel ideas to address roles of mechanics in disease progression and treatment. Presents innovative applications of biomechanics in medical procedures.

An overview of biomechanical modeling of human soft tissue using nonlinear theoretical mechanics and incremental finite element methods, useful for computer simulation of the human musculoskeletal system.

The articles in this book review hybrid experimental-computational methods applied to soft tissues which have been developed by worldwide specialists in the field. People developing computational models of soft tissues and organs will find solutions for calibrating the material parameters of their models; people performing tests on soft tissues will learn what to extract from the data and how to use these data for their models and people worried about the complexity of the biomechanical behavior of soft tissues will find relevant approaches to address this complexity.

Exploring the structure and mechanics of aging soft tissues, this edited volume presents authoritative reviews from leading experts on a range of tissues including skin, tendons, vasculature and plantar soft tissues. It provides an overview of in vivo and in vitro measurement techniques including state-of-the-art methodologies, as well as focusing on the structural changes that occur within the main components of these tissues resulting in detrimental mechanical property changes. It also highlights the current challenges of this field, and offers an insight into future developments. Age-related changes in the mechanical properties of soft tissues have a profound effect on human morbidity and mortality, and with changing global demographics, there is growing interest in this area. There has been increasing interest in robustly characterizing these mechanical changes to develop structure-property relationships, and growing awareness of the need for enhanced predictive models for computational simulations. This book seeks to address the challenges involved in applying these engineering techniques to reliably characterize these tissues. Focusing on a wide range of tissues and presenting cutting-edge techniques, this book provides an invaluable reference to academics and researchers in a range of disciplines including biomechanics, materials science, tissue engineering, life sciences and biomedicine.

The book is written by leading experts in the field presenting an up-to-date view of the subject matter in a didactically sound manner. It presents a review of the current knowledge of the behaviour of soft tissues in the cardiovascular system under mechanical loads, and the importance of constitutive laws in understanding the underlying mechanics is highlighted. Cells are also described together with arteries, tendons and ligaments, heart, and other biological tissues of current research interest in biomechanics. This includes experimental, continuum mechanical and computational perspectives, with the emphasis on nonlinear behaviour, and the simulation of mechanical procedures such as balloon angioplasty.

This volume focuses on the biomechanical modeling of biological tissues in the context of Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS). More specifically, deformable soft tissues are addressed since they are the subject of the most recent developments in this field. The pioneering works on this CAS topic date from the 1980's, with applications in orthopaedics and biomechanical models of bones. More recently, however, biomechanical models of soft tissues have been proposed since most of the human body is made of soft organs that can be deformed by the surgical gesture. Such models are much more complicated to handle since the tissues can be subject to large deformations (non-linear geometrical framework) as well as complex stress/strain relationships (non-linear mechanical framework). Part 1 of the volume presents biomechanical models that have been developed in a CAS context and used during surgery. This is particularly new since most of the soft tissues models already proposed concern Computer Assisted Planning, with a pre-operative use of the models. Then, the volume addresses the two key issues raised for an intra-operative use of soft tissues models, namely (Part 2) “how to estimate the in vivo mechanical behavior of the tissues?” (i.e. what are the values of the mechanical parameters that can deliver realistic patient-specific behavior?) and (Part 3) “how to build a modeling platform that provides generic real-time (or at least interactive-time) numerical simulations?”

This special volume of the Journal of Elasticity represents the first in a new p- gram dedicated to the occasional publication of collections of invited, reviewed papers of topical interest. The purpose of this program is to spotlight the dev- opments and applications in the mechanics of materials within specific areas that can enhance growth and provide insight for the advancement of the field as well as promote fundamental understanding and basic discovery. Soft Tissue Mechanics is an area of biomechanics that draws heavily upon f- damental ideas and material models from nonlinear elasticity and viscoelasticity. A major goal of this research is to understand those mechanics properties of heart, artery, collagen and skeletal muscle tissue that can be used for the diagnosis of health problems and the improvement of human life. This volume illustrates how experiment, modeling and computation is currently employed in this emerging field. May 2001 ROGER FOSDICK Editor-in-Chief Journal of Elasticity 61: ix–xii, 2000. ix Preface There are two primary areas for the application of elasticity in the biomechanics of tissues: hard tissue mechanics (e.g., bone, teeth, horns, etc.) and soft tissue - chanics (e.g., skin, tendons, arteries, etc.). The distinguishing feature between these tissue types is the amount of physiological “normal” deformation they experience. While “hard” tissues only experience small deformations, soft tissues typically experience large deformations. From a biomechanics viewpoint soft tissues fall within the realm of finite elasticity.