ANISOTROPIC INVERSE MECHANICS IDENTIFIES REGIONAL CHANGES IN MECHANICAL ANISOTROPY DURING REMODELLING OF FIBROBLAST-POPULATED COLLAGEN CRUCIFORMS

摘要

Most elastographic methods applied to soft tissues assume either isotropy or homogeneity in the sample. While this assumption is valid in specific cases, general methods that can identify regional changes in mechanical anisotropy have many advantages. Chiefly, such methods could quantify regional anisotropic material behavior on intact tissue samples especially when the tissue is heterogeneous and too small for standard tests. In this study we use an inverse mechanics method which handles both anisotropy and heterogeneity to track changes in mechanical anisotropy associated with remodeling in cell-compacted collagen tissue equivalents (TE), which are then compared with measurements from polarimetry to estimate the method's accuracy.