Mechanical properties of abnormal human aortic and mitral valves

Details about custom built experimental set up to perform uniaxial and biaxial tests on planar soft tissues are presented. This displacement controlled set up can apply and measure loads ranging up to 100 N. The surface deformation is determined from tracking markers in 3D space using 2 CCD cameras. Discarded valve tissue from patients undergoing valve replacement surgery were collected and stored at 4°C in normal saline and experiments were completed within 24 hours from harvest. Uniaxial tests on aortic valve leaflets and biaxial tests on mitral valve leaflets were conducted. Results show that the deformation of these tissues is not homogeneous. The principal stretches in the plane orthogonal to the direction of stretching in the uniaxial stretch experiment are not the same but the principal directions do not change much with loading. Further, the results show that both the valve leaflets are compressible. The loading and unloading path is nearly the same and is not sensitive to the rate of displacement when it is varied between 200μm/s and 800μm/s. These results have implications in the development of constitutive models for these tissues.