A unified approach to model peripheral nerves across different animal species

PeerJ

article

Elisabetta Giannessi¹  Maria Rita Stornelli¹  Pier Nicola Sergi² 

[1] Department of Veterinary Science, University of Pisa;Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory, The Biorobotics Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies

关键词: Peripheral nerves;    Finite Element Models;    Yeoh-like strain energy function;    Computational models;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.4005

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Peripheral nerves are extremely complex biological structures. The knowledge of their response to stretch is crucial to better understand physiological and pathological states (e.g., due to overstretch). Since their mechanical response is deterministically related to the nature of the external stimuli, theoretical and computational tools were used to investigate their behaviour. In this work, a Yeoh-like polynomial strain energy function was used to reproduce the response of in vitro porcine nerve. Moreover, this approach was applied to different nervous structures coming from different animal species (rabbit, lobster, Aplysia) and tested for different amount of stretch (up to extreme ones). Starting from this theoretical background, in silico models of both porcine nerves and cerebro-abdominal connective of Aplysia were built to reproduce experimental data (R2 0.9). Finally, bi-dimensional in silico models were provided to reduce computational time of more than 90% with respect to the performances of fully three-dimensional models.

【 授权许可】

CC BY