A new method of estimating gauge length for porcine aortic valve test specimens

Porcine aortic valve (PAV) cusps are folded and wrinkled in the in vitro state. In the tensile testing of PAV specimens, estimating gauge length (the length at which a specimen starts to offer measurable resistance to load) is often difficult and subjective. We have therefore developed a new method for estimating the gauge length of such tissues. The method is based on the observation that the specimen's gauge length can be associated with a stationary point on the slope of its load-length curve if loaded from a wrinkled state, or a state of slight compression. We represented the load-length response of test specimens in the low-load, high-compliance region by a cubic function and determined the stationary point on the slope of the function using elementary calculus. The cubic function representation is fine-tuned by reducing or expanding an originally selected "test region" until the correlation coefficient of the cubic fit is maximized. The new method was applied to data obtained from the tensile testing of strips of heart valve tissue and was found to be objective, repeatable and robust.