Assessment of the nano-mechanical properties of healthy and atherosclerotic coronary arteries by atomic force microscopy.

Nano-indentation techniques might be better equipped to assess the heterogeneous material properties of plaques than macroscopic methods but there are no bespoke protocols for this kind of material testing for coronary arteries. Therefore, we developed a measurement protocol to extract mechanical properties from healthy and atherosclerotic coronary artery tissue sections. Young's modulus was derived from force-indentation data.