ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomechanics
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Measurement Techniques in Tissue Biomechanics: From Cellular to Whole-Body ModelsView all 4 articles
Noninvasive Estimation of Material Properties of Normal and Dissected Human Ascending Aortas In Vivo: Comparison with the Ex Vivo Tensile Experiment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China
- 2Southeast University, Nanjing, China
- 3Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, United States
- 4The First Affiliated Hospital With Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Patient-specific aortic material properties play a critical role in aortic dissection development. This study proposed a noninvasive method to assess in vivo anisotropic mechanical properties of normal and dissected ascending aortas, and compare with their ex vivo material properties. Biaxial tensile testing was performed for 10 ascending aortic specimens (five patients with type A aortic dissection, five donors without aortic diseases), with testing data fitted by anisotropic Mooney-Rivlin models. An iterative algorithm was proposed to determine in vivo aortic material properties by matching systolic and diastolic aortic geometries from echocardiography images with computed tomography-based computational models. Three settings of initial guesses of material parameters (M01: subject-specific ex vivo parameters; M02: ex vivo parameters of one subject with median stiffness; M03: a 5% variation added to M02) were investigated in the iterative algorithm for their influences on in vivo properties estimation and effective Young's moduli along circumferential (YMc) and axial (YMa) directions. M01-derived in vivo properties had a maximum relative error of −33.44% in YMc/YMa among 10 subjects, compared to ex vivo material properties. The median relative error of YMc was −29.40% for M02. Furthermore, a 5% variation of initial parameters caused less than 1.5% change on estimated in vivo properties. Anisotropy difference between the initial material guess and real aortic tissue would have a significant impact on YMa estimation but negligible effects on stress distributions. Overall, in vivo material properties estimated by the proposed method exhibited lower YMc values compared to experimental results for normal and dissected ascending aortas.
Keywords: aortic dissection, ascending aortic tissue, in vivo material properties, Finite Element Analysis, Biaxial tensile test
Received: 20 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guo, Yang, Wang, Tang and Sun. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Liang Wang
Haoliang Sun
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.