Mechanical characterization of the softening behavior of human vaginal tissue

• Tipo: Artigo em Revista Científica Internacional
• Data: 2011

Autores

Pena, E (Autor) Outra; Martins, P (Autor) Outra; Mascarenhas, T (Autor) FMUP; Natal Jorge, RMN (Autor) FEUP; Ferreira, A (Autor) FEUP; Doblare, M (Autor) Outra; Calvo, B (Autor) Outra

Revista

Título: Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials

Vol. 4

Páginas: 275-283

ISSN: 1751-6161

Editora: Elsevier

Indexação

ISI Web of Knowledge - 54 Citações

ISI Web of Science

Scopus - 56 Citações

Classificação Científica

FOS: Ciências da engenharia e tecnologias > Biotecnologia ambiental

CORDIS: Ciências Tecnológicas > Engenharia > Engenharia biomédica

Outras Informações

ID Authenticus: P-002-T2N

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmbbm.2010.10.006

Abstract (EN): The mechanical properties of vaginal tissue need to be characterized to perform accurate simulations of prolapse and other pelvic disorders that commonly affect women. This is also a fundamental step towards the improvement of therapeutic techniques such as surgery. In this paper, the softening behavior or Mullins effect of vaginal tissue is studied by proposing an appropriate constitutive model. This effect is an important factor after the birth, since vaginal tissue has been supporting a high load distribution and therefore does not recover its original behavior. Due to the anisotropy of the tissue, the mechanical testing of vaginal tissue, consists in loading-unloading uniaxial tension tests performed along the longitudinal and transverse axes of the vagina. A directional pseudo-elastic model was used to reproduce the inelastic behavior of the tissue. The obtained results may be helpful in the design of surgical procedures with autologous tissue or smart prostheses. A good qualitative agreement has been found between the numerical and experimental results for the vaginal tissue examples, indicating that the constitutive softening model can capture the typical stress-strain behavior observed in this kind of fibrous soft tissue.

Idioma: Inglês

Tipo (Avaliação Docente): Científica

Nº de páginas: 9