Implications of vehicle roll direction on occupant ejection and injury risk.

Vehicle roll direction and occupant position have been shown to affect occupant kinematics. Data from NASS-CDS were analyzed for risk of serious or greater injuries and ejection with respect to the position of the occupant (near side or far side). The risk of AIS 3+ injuries was higher for unrestrained occupants, for ejected occupants, for occupants involved in rollovers with higher numbers of quarter turns, and for far side occupants.

Changes in the biaxial viscoelastic response of the urinary bladder following spinal cord injury.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of bladder function, it is necessary to study the time-dependent response of the bladder wall. The present study evaluated and compared the viscoelastic behaviors of normal and spinal cord injured (SCI) rat bladder wall tissue using an established rat model and planar biaxial stress relaxation tests. Bladders from normal and spinalized (3 weeks) rats were subjected to biaxial stress (either 25 or 100 kPa in each loading direction) rapidly (in 50 ms) and subsequently allowed to relax at the constant stretch levels in modified Kreb's solution (in the absence of calcium; with no smooth muscle tone) for 10,000 s.

Biaxial mechanical properties of muscle-derived cell seeded small intestinal submucosa for bladder wall reconstitution.

Bladder wall replacement remains a challenging problem for urological surgery due to leakage, infection, stone formation, and extensive time needed for tissue regeneration. To explore the feasibility of producing a more functional biomaterial for bladder reconstitution, we incorporated muscle-derived cells (MDC) into small intestinal submucosa (SIS) scaffolds. MDC were harvested from mice hindleg muscle, transfected with a plasmid encoding for beta-galactosidase, and placed into single-layer SIS cell culture inserts.

Parasitic exploitation as an engine of diversity.

Parasitic exploitation occurs within and between a wide variety of taxa in a plethora of diverse contexts. Theoretical and empirical analyses indicate that parasitic exploitation can generate substantial genetic and phenotypic polymorphism within species. Under some circumstances, parasitic exploitation may also be an important factor causing reproductive isolation and promoting speciation.

Passive biaxial mechanical properties of the rat bladder wall after spinal cord injury.

Purpose: Changes in the mechanical properties of the bladder wall after spinal cord injury can alter bladder compliance and wall tension, leading to changes in afferent nerve activity and to abnormal reflex mechanisms. To our knowledge we report the first application of biaxial mechanical testing to the normal bladder wall and demonstrate how these properties change after spinal cord injury.

Materials And Methods: Whole bladders were harvested from mature female Sprague-Dawley rats weighing 250 to 300 gm.

Mechanical evaluation and design of a multilayered collagenous repair biomaterial.

One method of fabricating implantable biomaterials is to utilize biologically derived, chemically modified tissues to form constructs that are both biocompatible and remodelable. Rigorous mechanical characterization is a necessary component in material evaluation to ensure that the constructs will withstand in vivo loading. In this study we performed an in-depth biaxial mechanical and quantitative structural analysis of GraftPatch (GP), a biomaterial constructed by assembling chemically treated layers of porcine small intestinal submucosa (SIS).

Mechanisms of bioprosthetic heart valve failure: fatigue causes collagen denaturation and glycosaminoglycan loss.

Bioprosthetic heart valve (BPHV) degeneration, characterized by extracellular matrix deterioration, remodeling, and calcification, is an important clinical problem accounting for thousands of surgeries annually. Here we report for the first time, in a series of in vitro accelerated fatigue studies (5-500 million cycles) with glutaraldehyde fixed porcine aortic valve bioprostheses, that the mechanical function of cardiac valve cusps caused progressive damage to the molecular structure of type I collagen as assessed by Fourier transform IR spectroscopy (FTIR). The cyclic fatigue caused a progressive loss of helicity of the bioprosthetic cuspal collagen, which was evident from FTIR spectral changes in the amide I carbonyl stretching region.

Quantification of the fiber architecture and biaxial mechanical behavior of porcine intestinal submucosa.

Porcine small intestinal submucosa (SIS) has been shown to serve as a remodelable tissue scaffold in a wide range of applications. Despite the large number of experimental studies, there is a lack of fundamental information on SIS anisotropic mechanical behavior and how this behavior changes postimplantation. As a first step in our study of remodeling biomaterials, we performed biaxial mechanical testing to quantify the anisotropic mechanical behavior and used small-angle light scattering (SALS) to quantify the gross fiber structure of fresh, unimplanted SIS.

Effects of mechanical fatigue on the bending properties of the porcine bioprosthetic heart valve.

The mechanisms underlying the failure of porcine bioprosthetic aortic heart valves are not well understood. One possible explanation is that delaminations of the layered leaflet structure occur through flexion, leading to calcification and further delaminations, and finally resulting in valve failure. We investigated the changes in flexural rigidity of the belly of aortic valve cusps subjected to accelerated durability testing.