The need to account for residual strains and composite nature of heart wall in mechanical analyses

We studied 19 excised, passive rabbit left ventricular walls to delineate the forms of the strain-energy functions (W) for myocardium and epicardium, to quantify residual strains across the wall, and to investigate whether the mechanical behavior of the intact wall can be predicted by accounting for the above properties. The unloaded dimensions and the stress-strain responses to equibiaxial and uniaxial loadings were obtained first for the intact wall and then individually for the epicardium and myocardium. Results show that the previously proposed W for canine myocardium and epicardium are suitable. The unloaded intact wall has residual strains: the epicardium is stretched and the myocardium shrunk from their respective isolated, unloaded states. The predicted mechanical responses of the intact wall to biaxial loadings were inaccurate when the residual strains were not taken into account. Accounting for these, however, yielded reasonable predictions. Thus information on the unloaded reference state and properties of each portion is needed to accurately predict the behavior of the intact wall.