Elastic behavior of porcine coronary artery tissue under uniaxial and equibiaxial tension

The aim of this study was to characterize the nonlinear anisotropic elastic behavior of healthy porcine coronary arteries under uniaxial and equibiaxial tension. Porcine coronary tissue was chosen for its availability and similarity to human arterial tissue. A biaxial test device previously used to test human femoral arterial tissue samples (Prendergast, P. J., C. Lally, S. Daly, A. J. Reid, T. C. Lee, D. Quinn, and F. Dolan. ASME J. Biomech. Eng., Vol. 125, pp. 692-699, 2003) was further developed to test porcine coronary tissue specimens. The device applies an equal force to the four sides of a square specimen and therefore creates a biaxial stretch that demonstrates the anisotropy of arterial tissue. The nonlinear elastic behavior was marked in both uniaxial and biaxial tests. The tissue demonstrated higher stiffness in the circumferential direction in four out of eight cases subjected to biaxial tension. Even though anisotropy is demonstrated it is proposed that an isotropic hyperelastic model may adequately represent the properties of an artery, provided that an axial stretch is applied to the vessel to simulate the in vivo longitudinal tethering on the vessel. Isotropic hyperelastic models based on the Mooney-Rivlin constitutive equation were derived from the test data by averaging the longitudinal and circumferential equibiaxial data. Three different hyperelastic models were established to represent the test specimens that exhibited a high stiffness, an average stiffness, and a low stiffness response; these three models allow the analyst to account for the variability in the arterial tissue mechanical properties. These models, which take account of the nonlinear elastic behavior of coronary tissue, may be implemented in finite element models and used to carry out preclinical tests of intravascular devices. The errors associated with the hyperelastic models when fitting to both the uniaxial and equibiaxial data for the low stiffness, average stiffness, and high stiffness models were found to be 0.836, 5.206, and 2.980, respectively.