Response to the Letter to the Editor: Measurement of the uniaxial mechanical properties of healthy and atherosclerotic human coronary arteries

摘要

We would like to highly appreciate Professor Ray W. Ogden and Professor Gerhard A. Holzapfel for their comments on our paper that measured the uniaxial mechanical properties of healthy and atherosclerotic human coronary arteries.We agree that our study on the linear mechanical properties of coronary artery is promising and for further research, including that additional information on the nonlinear anisotropic behavior of coronary arteries, may be needed to improve our results. However, the purpose of our study was to simply measure the elastic modulus of healthy and atherosclerotic human coronary arteries using uniaxial tensile test In the first step of our research on the mechanical behavior of coronary arteries, we measured the elastic modulus of healthy and atherosclerotic coronary arteries in order to indicate the effects of atherosclerotic on the elastic modulus of a coronary artery. We believe that elastic modulus can relatively clarify the stiffness of materials especially the soft ones as there are many research in this area which consider the elastic behavior of soft tissues. In addition, the stress-strain curves of coronary arteries have been provided in our previously published papers.