A Mechanical Characterization of the Porcine Atria at the Healthy Stage and After Ventricular Tachypacing

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a cardiac arrhythmia that highly increases the risk of stroke and is associated with significant but still unexplored changes in the mechanical behavior of the tissue. Planar biaxial tests were performed on tissue specimens from pigs at the healthy stage and after ventricular tachypacing (VTP), a procedure applied to reproduce the relevant features of AF. The local arrangement of the fiber bundles in the tissue was investigated on specimens from rabbit atria by means of circularly polarized light. Based on this, mechanical data were fitted to two anisotropic constitutive relationships, including a four-parameter Fung-type model and a microstructurally-motivated model. Accounting for the fiber-induced anisotropy brought average R² = 0.807 for the microstructurally-motivated model and average R² = 0.949 for the Fung model. Validation of the fitted constitutive relationships was performed by means of FEM simulations coupled to FORTRAN routines. The performances of the two material models in predicting the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress were comparable, with average errors <3.1%. However, the Fung model outperformed the other in the prediction of the Green-Lagrange strain, with 9.2% maximum average error. To increase model generality, a proper averaging procedure accounting for nonlinearities was used to obtain average material parameters. In general, a stiffer behavior after VTP was noted.