A finite element approach for gastrointestinal tissue mechanics

The biomechanical properties of gastrointestinal (GI) tissue play a significant role in the normal functioning of the organ. GI soft tissues exhibit a highly nonlinear rate- and time-dependent stress-strain behaviour. In recent years, many constitutive relations have been proposed to characterize these properties. However, a constitutive relation is not sufficient to analyse the biomechanics at the organ level with complex loading and boundary conditions. Hence, for a refined mechanical analysis, a finite element (FE) implementation of the constitutive relation is needed. Here, we propose an FE implementation of a finite nonlinear hyperviscoelastic model suitable for soft biological tissues. The FE model has been validated at first by comparing its results with the analytical solutions of a standard linear solid, and then it has been used to recreate experimental observations performed on tissue strips obtained from different animals. We have also proposed a method, in this work, to construct a residually stressed FE model so that the consequences of residual stresses on GI mechanics can be examined. Our FE formulation was able to capture the nonlinear soft tissue properties and also demonstrated that the addition of residual stresses reduces stress concentrations and the stress gradient in the GI wall.