A simple biomechanical and biochemical testing approach can quantify properties of semilunar heart valve tissues, potentially facilitating tissue-engineered heart valve development.
Valve anisotropy differences at strain thresholds may guide tissue-engineered semilunar valve scaffolds; leaves open translation from animal data to human application.
A simple biomechanical test with real-time displacement and strain mapping is reported, which provides displacement vectors and principal strain directions during the mechanical characterization of heart valve tissues. The maps reported in the current study allow us to quickly identify the approximate strain imposed on a location in the samples. The biomechanical results show that the aortic valves exhibit stronger anisotropic mechanical behavior than that of the pulmonary valves before 18% strain equibiaxial stretching. In contrast, the pulmonary valves exhibit stronger anisotropic mechanical behavior than aortic valves beyond 28% strain equibiaxial stretching. Simple biochemical tests are also conducted. Collagens are extracted at different time points (24, 48, 72, and 120 h) at different locations in the samples. The results show that extraction time plays an important role in determining collagen concentration, in which a minimum of 72 h of extraction is required to obtain saturated collagen concentration. This work provides an easy approach for quantifying biomechanical and biochemical properties of semilunar heart valve tissues, and potentially facilitates the development of tissue engineered heart valves.
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Huang et al. (2012) studied Heart valve tissues. Biomechanical and biochemical testing vs. Aortic vs pulmonary valves was evaluated on Anisotropic mechanical behavior and collagen concentration.
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