Non-invasive, energy-based assessment of patient-specific material properties of arterial tissue.

The mechanical properties of human biological tissue vary greatly. The determination of arterial material properties should be based on experimental data, i.e. diameter, length, intramural pressure, axial force and stress-free geometry. Currently, clinical data provide only non-invasively measured pressure-diameter data for superficial arteries (e.g. common carotid and femoral artery). The lack of information forces us to take into account certain assumptions regarding the in situ configuration to estimate material properties in vivo. This paper proposes a new, non-invasive, energy-based approach for arterial material property estimation. This approach is compared with an approach proposed in the literature. For this purpose, a simplified finite element model of an artery was used as a mock experimental situation. This method enables exact knowledge of the actual material properties, thereby allowing a quantitative evaluation of material property estimation approaches. The results show that imposing conditions on strain energy can provide a good estimation of the material properties from the non-invasively measured pressure and diameter data.