ABSTRACT
In the field of biomechanics, it is important to understand the mechanical properties of biological tissues in order to model their behavior under normal and abnormal pathological and traumatic conditions. Biomechanical modeling of soft tissues can play a significant role in improving a wide range of medical procedures, including diagnostics, treatment, planning, and interventions (Holzapfel 2004). In addition, studying the mechanics of biological tissues is essential to predict their response in traumatic incidents of extreme loading conditions such as vehicle and sports accidents. Tensile and indentation-testing techniques are fundamental approaches to characterize the behavior of a wide range of materials. These tests are based on applying loads to material samples while monitoring corresponding deformation, sometimes to failure, in an attempt to understand the mechanical behavior of a material. They have been widely used in the field of biomedical engineering in which biological tissues are deformed with certain strain rates to characterize their mechanical response. Biological soft tissues are inhomogeneous by nature and tend to behave anisotropically under loading, which poses a challenge to understanding their mechanics. As a result, most of the available literature concentrates on an overall mechanical performance by assuming that tissues behave isotropically under loading using techniques such as tensile and indentation loading. This chapter presents an overview of these studies and introduces the fundamentals of indentation and tensile testing. Examples of how different biological tissue morphologies impact tissue mechanics are also presented.
