Mechanical and microstructural behavior of vascular tissue

Accurate determination of the tissue response after vascular surgeries or pathologies in patients requires developing appropriate models of the organ or vessel under consideration. In this regard, combining experimental techniques to determine the mechanical properties of the tissues with the development of advanced constitutive laws that mimic the behavior of vascular tissue with advanced computer analysis provides a powerful tool for modeling vascular tissues. In vascular tissues, there is a strong alignment of the collagen fibers with little dispersion in their orientation, but in other cases, such as the artery wall, there is a significant dispersion in the orientation. This behavior is more difficult to reproduce with the classical phenomenological strain energy functions used in the literature, and the microstructurally based models fitted the experimental data very well. In this chapter, we study some constitutive models, some with a phenomenological approach, and others that are microstructurally and physically oriented, that describe more accurately the features of the arterial wall. The mechanical behavior and structural organization of the descending thoracic aorta and carotid artery are studied together in order to overcome some limitations of previous models. We aim to examine the advantages and limitations of phenomenological versus more microstructural-oriented approaches. In this direction, we include the microconstituent volume percentages in all these approaches to feed such models with a more physically motivated variable.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft