10 research outputs found
The Cardiovascular System as a Smart System
Our work aims at modelling and simulating the growth processes that allow
the cardiovascular system to adapt to the overall body development and to
changing physiological (and pathological) conditions. Within the cardiovascular
system, we pay particular attention to the heart and the aorta.
A healthy aortic wall succeeds in keeping a homeostatic stress level in
spite of long-standing alterations in pressure or flow by triggering growth and
remodelling processes that change its stress-free shape and its structure.
A normal heart grows in response to the gradually increasing haemodynamic
loading exerted on myocardial fibres. Postnatal cardiac growth is a form
of volume-overload hypertrophy, produced essentially by a progressive myocardial
cell enlargement, with no cell proliferation involved.
In our continuum model, growth is basically conceived of as the time evolution
of the stress-free configuration of the tiny fragments into which the
modelled tissue may be subdivided in imagination. It is governed by a novel
balance law—the balance of accretive couples—independent of, but constitutively
coupled with, the standard balance of forces
Review. Rheological properties of biological materials
Eucaryotic cells and biological materials are described from a rheological point of view. Single cell properties give rise to typical microrheological properties which can affect cell behaviour, in close connection with their adhesion properties. Single cell properties are also important in the context of multicellular systems, i.e. in biological tissues. Results from experiments are analyzed and models proposed both at the cellular scale and the macroscopic scale. Key words: Rheology, tissues, cell mechanics, viscoelastic 1