Strain stiffening of peripheral nerves subjected to longitudinal extensions in vitro.

Med Eng Phys

Translational Neural Engineering Area, The Biorobotics Institute, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, PSV, 56025 Pontedera, Italy. Electronic address:

Published: February 2020

The mechanical response of peripheral nerves is crucial to understand their physiological and pathological conditions. However, their response to external mechanical solicitations is still partially unclear, since peripheral nerves could behave in a quite complex way. In particular, nerves react to longitudinal strains increasing their stiffness to keep axons integrity and to preserve endoneural structures from overstretch. In this work, the strain stiffening of peripheral nerves was investigated in vitro through a recently introduced computational framework, which is able to theoretically reproduce the experimental behaviour of excised tibial and sciatic nerves. The evolution and the variation of the tangent modulus of tibial and sciatic nerve specimens were quantitatively investigated and compared to explore how stretched peripheral nerves change their instantaneous stiffness.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.medengphy.2019.10.012DOI Listing

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