Characterization of mechanical properties of biological tissue: application to the FEM analysis of the urinary bladder.

E. OÑATE; F. BELLOMO; V. MONTEIRO; S. OLLER; L. NALLIM

Multiscale simulations and mechanics of biological materials,

John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

Año: 2013; p. 283 - 300

This chapter presents an approach for the mechanical behavior of soft biological tissue using the finiteelements method (FEM) and a general constitutive model. Specifically, we analyze the mechanical behavior of a urinary bladder starting from a procedure for obtaining the mechanical characterization of the biological tissue. The difficulty in this study lies not only in modeling the mechanical behavior of the bladder subjected to inflation under the presence of an internal fluid, but also in the difficulty encountered in determining the biomechanical properties of the biological tissue that forms the bladder.Bladder tissue is modeled as a composite material formed by soft matrix reinforced with preferentially oriented fibers. In the first part of the chapter we present a procedure for identifying the mechanical properties of biological tissue?s main constituents by an inverse method. Then this information is used for the numerical simulation of the mechanical behavior of the bladder within the FEM.The formulation can be applied to various types of biological tissues, both in the field of material characterization and in the numerical simulation of the tissue?s biomechanical behavior. The approach presented in this chapter has been applied to the study of the arterial tissue behavior [1].