Mechanical guidelines on the properties of human healthy arteries in the design and fabrication of vascular grafts: experimental tests and quasi-linear viscoelastic model.

PURPOSE: Knowledge of mechanical behavior of healthy human arteries as the guidelines to target properties of vascular grafts deserves special attention. There is a lack of mathematical model to characterize mechanical behavior of biomaterial while many mathematical models to reflect mechanics of human arteries have been proposed. The objective of this paper was set to measure mechanical properties of healthy human arteries including Common Carotid Artery (CCA), Abdominal Aorta Artery (AAA), Subclavian Artery (SA), Common Iliac Artery (CIA) and Right and Left Iliac Artery (RIA and LIA) and compare them to those of commercial ePTFE and Dacron®. METHODS: Series of stress relaxation and strain to failure tests vere performed on all samples. The experimental data was utilized to develop quasi-linear viscoelastic (QLV) model of both natural and artificial arteries. RESULTS: ePTFE is the stiffest sample, while the CCA is the most compliant one among all. RIA and CIA are more viscous than the other natural arteries, while AA and CCA are less viscous. The proposed model demonstrated an accurate fit to the experimental results, a proof of its ability to model both nonlinear elasticity and viscoelasticity of the human arteries and commercial ones. CONCLUSIONS: ePTFE and Dacron® are much stiffer than human arteries that may lead to the disruption of blood hemodynamic and may not be biomechanically feasible as a replacement.

Fabrication and characterization of ovalbumin films for wound dressing applications.

A great number of people suffer from burning injuries all around the world each year. Applying an appropriate wound dressing can promote new tissue formation, prevent losing water and inhibit invasion of infectious organisms. In this study, egg white with a long standing history, as a homemade remedy, was fabricated as a wound dressing for burn injuries. For this reason, ovalbumin films were cross-linked by 1-ethyl-3-3-dimethyl aminopropyl carbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC) with different concentrations (1, 5 and 10mM) using three concentrations of ethanol. Physical-chemical characterizations including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), gas transmission rate (GTR), tensile mechanical tests, water uptake and degradation rate were performed on the samples. The sample with 5mM crosslinking agent at 70% ethanol was considered as the optimized one with 417kPa of ultimate tensile strength, 64% elongation at break and 230% water uptake. In addition, biological evaluations conducted by MTT and live/dead assay indicated no sign of cyto-toxicity for all the samples. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the fibroblast cells were well spread on the sample with the formation of filopodia. In conclusion, modified ovalbumin can be applied as the base material for fabrication of wound dressing and skin care products.

Do mechanical properties of human fetal membrane depend on strain rate?

AIM: The objective of this study was to examine the effect of strain rate on the mechanical properties of human fetal membranes. METHODS: Different strain rates were employed to quantify the stress-strain relation of the chorioamnion membrane. The mechanical properties of nine human amnion membranes, four collected from cesarean delivery and five collected from normal vaginal delivery, were examined in uniaxial tension tests under strain rates of 0.1, 1 and 10%/min. RESULTS: Statistical analysis revealed significant (P < 0.05) correlation between the change in strain rate and the elastic modulus as well as failure strain of amnion samples. The rupture stress, though, did not show dependency on strain rates. CONCLUSION: Human chorioamnion is strongly viscoelastic. By increasing the rate of the test, the stiffness of amnion increases considerably.

A tensile machine with a novel optical load cell for soft biological tissues application.

The uniaxial tensile testing machine is the most common device used to measure the mechanical properties of industrial and biological materials. The need for a low-cost uniaxial tension testing device for small research centers has always been the subject of research. To address this need, a novel uniaxial tensile testing machine was designed and fabricated to measure the mechanical properties of soft biological tissues. The device is equipped with a new low-cost load cell which works based on the linear displacement/force relationship of beams. The deflection of the beam load cell is measured optically by a digital microscope with an accuracy of 1 µm. The stiffness of the designed load cell was experimentally and theoretically determined at 100 N mm(-1). The stiffness of the load cell can be easily adjusted according to the tissue's strength. The force-time behaviour of soft tissue specimens was obtained by an in-house image processing program. To demonstrate the efficiency of the fabricated device, the mechanical properties of amnion tissue was measured and compared with available data. The obtained results indicate a strong agreement with that of previous studies.