On incorporating osmotic prestretch/prestress in image-driven finite element simulations of cartilage.

Medical imaging performed in vivo captures geometries under Donnan osmotic loading, even when the articulating joint is otherwise mechanically unloaded. Hence patient-specific finite element (FE) models constructed from such medical images of cartilage represent osmotically induced prestretched/prestressed states. When applying classical modeling approaches to patient-specific simulations of cartilage a theoretical inconsistency arises: the in-vivo imaged geometry (used to construct the model) is not an unloaded, stress-free reference configuration.

Growth Description for Vessel Wall Adaptation: A Thick-Walled Mixture Model of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Evolution.

(1) Background: Vascular tissue seems to adapt towards stable homeostatic mechanical conditions, however, failure of reaching homeostasis may result in pathologies. Current vascular tissue adaptation models use many assumptions, the implications of which are far from being fully understood; (2) Methods: The present study investigates the plausibility of different growth kinematics in modeling Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) evolution in time. A structurally motivated constitutive description for the vessel wall is coupled to multi-constituent tissue growth descriptions; Constituent deposition preserved either the constituent's density or its volume, and Isotropic Volume Growth (IVG), in-Plane Volume Growth (PVG), in-Thickness Volume Growth (TVG) and No Volume Growth (NVG) describe the kinematics of the growing vessel wall.

Modeling the dispersion in electromechanically coupled myocardium.

We present an approach to model the dispersion of fiber and sheet orientations in the myocardium. By utilizing structure parameters, an existing orthotropic and invariant-based constitutive model developed to describe the passive behavior of the myocardium is augmented. Two dispersion parameters are fitted to experimentally observed angular dispersion data of the myocardial tissue.