Electrical stimulation of smooth muscle strips from the urinary bladder of the pig

Strips of smooth muscle from pig urinary bladders were electrically stimulated to contract. Stimulation parameters and conditions were optimized so as to obtain a maximum number of isometric contractions with maximal force. It was found that the contractions could be described mathematically by a simple model. In the model there is a constant probability for cells to pass from the non-contractile to the contractile state during stimulation; this leads to a linearly decreasing phase plot (a plot of the rate of rise of a variable as a function of the variable) for the force. 'Activation' of the cells is described by a physical step function. Isometric contractions were thus characterized by a set of three parameters: U, the time derivative of the force, extrapolated to zero force, Fiso the value of the isometric force which is approached asymptotically after infinitely long periods of stimulation and t1, the activation time. The sensitivity of these three parameters to variation of the stimulus parameters was investigated. It was found that the parameter U was consistently correlated with the stimulus parameters, suggesting that this parameter can be used to describe the effectiveness of electrical stimulation of such strips.