Abstract
The mechanics of most soft tissues in the human body are determined by the organization of their collagen fibers. Predicting how mechanics will change during growth and remodeling of those tissues requires constitutive laws that account for the density and dispersion of collagen fibers. Post-infarction scar in the heart, a mechanically and structurally complex material, does not yet have a validated fiber-based constitutive model. In this study, we tested four different constitutive laws employing exponential or polynomial strain-energy functions and accounting for either mean fiber orientation alone or the details of the fiber distribution about that mean. We quantified the goodness of fit of each law to mechanical testing data from 6-week-old myocardial scar in the rat using both sum of squared error (SSE) and the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) to account for differences in the number of material parameters within the constitutive laws. We then compared their ability to prospectively predict the mechanics of independent myocardial scar samples from other time points during healing. Our analysis suggests that a constitutive law with a polynomial form that incorporates detailed information about collagen fiber distribution using a structure tensor provides excellent fits with just two parameters and reasonable predictions of myocardial scar mechanics from measured structure alone in scars containing sufficiently high collagen content.